Six horsemen riding across the sagebrush plain stop for a short rest. Two of them dismount. The tallest, a thin, bearded man in a heavy cloth coat, pulls up his collar against the chilly wind. His companion, a stocky man in buckskins, loosens the straps of his saddle bag and retrieves a heavy canteen of water. The bearded man stares at the ground, then kicks a large black rock. It shatters on impact. He leans down and picks up a piece. "Coal," he announces smiling and hands it to his companion. Curious, they scan the area and find more coal amid the sagebrush. When they remount, the bearded man takes a notebook from his saddlebag and writes briefly. Then they resume their journey, riding toward the west and disappearing into the haze across the horizon. Later, those reading the journals of John C. Fremont, who many called the Pathfinder of the West, would read of this episode. Fremont's Chance Discovery of Coal Near Kemmerer, Wyoming. (1843)

Vast coal reserves

Engineers and geologists say there are 500 million tons of coal on the high plateaus near Kemmerer available for surface mining and future underground extraction methods. This is good news to the miners, store owners, clerks, businessmen, and others who live and work in the area. For more than 100 years, coal has helped build families and communities in Lincoln County. It's also good news to electric utilities and other coal users. Serving their needs with high quality coal is The Pittsburg & Midway Coal Mining Company (P&M) Kemmerer Mine - Wyoming's deepest open pit coal mine. The mine's foremost customer is PacifiCorp's nearby coal fired 715-megawatt Naughton Plant. Two thirds of the coal taken from the Kemmerer Mine each year goes to fuel Naughton. The rest goes to industrial customers, mostly in the Green River, Wyoming area.

Ideal for steam generation

The coal is sub bituminous, a relatively soft, low sulfur, medium BTU, low ash coal that can be burned in fairly large quantities without adding harmful amounts of sulfur dioxide to the air. With the coming of transcontinental train travel in 1869, Union Pacific sought coal all along its right-of-way to fire its steam engines. Coal mining started near Kemmerer when U.P. opened a mine at Twin Creek in 1881, and completed a spur track to Kemmerer in 1885. However, mining did not begin in earnest until 1897 when Patrick J. Quealy and Mahlon S. Kemmerer formed a partnership and started the Kemmerer Coal Company. Coal was mined underground, and few jobs were harder or more dangerous. Picks, shovels and other hand tools were used to break the coal loose and load it into wagons. Mine accidents killed and injured hundreds. On August 14, 1923, an explosion at the old Kemmerer Coal Company's Frontier #1 Mine killed 99 men. Among the victims were immigrants from England, Ireland, Scandinavia, Japan and several Slavic countries.

Acquired by ChevronTexaco

Coal was mined underground until 1950, when surface or strip mining began. In July 1981, P&M and its parent corporation, Golf Oil, acquired the Kemmerer Coal Company. P&M became the mine operator in April 1983. In 1984, Chevron acquired Gulf.  P&M and the Kemmerer Mine are now part of ChevronTexaco Corporation. In the past two decades, mining equipment - much of it powered by electricity -  has become more and more efficient, raising the capacity of the mine to 4.6 million tons of coal a year. Surface mining is less complex than underground mining, but it isn't simply a matter of scooping up the coal and hauling it to market. Kemmerer's situation is especially difficult. Its unusually steep dipping, multiple coal seams make mining here more complicated than in typical surface mining operations. And, for every ton of coal taken from the Kemmerer mine, four to five times as much overburden - waste rock covering the coal seams - must be removed.

High-priced equipment

About half the 350 employees at the Kemmerer Mine are equipment operators. They man huge diesel drills that cost $0.7 million each, and operate bulldozers, back hoes, front end loaders, electric shovels that cost $8.3 million and scoop up 56 cubic yards of waste rock at a time, and $2.0 million  trucks that can hold 240 tons of material. The open pit mining is described as a truck shovel operation that consists of four steps: drilling, blasting, loading and hauling. Electric drills bore 8-inch-diameter holes as far as 50 feet down into the overburden. Blasting agents are placed in the holes, exploded, and loosened overburden is then picked up by gigantic electric shovels, loaded into trucks and hauled away.

Delivery via conveyor

Once the coal seams are exposed, bulldozers break the coal loose and push it into piles. Front end loaders then scoop up the coal and load it into trucks that take it to a processing facility where it is crushed and sorted into different qualities. A conveyor delivers the crushed coal to a stockpile adjacent to Naughton Plant where it is carried by another conveyor to the plant's boilers. Coal destined for other industrial customers is loaded into 100 ton rail cars or 18 wheel over-the-road trucks. Nearly 40,000 tons of coal leaves the mine each week via rail or truck. P&M is committed to a reclamation process that makes the terrain "as good or better than it was before being mined."  Topsoil is carefully removed and saved before any mining is started. When mining in a particular area has been concluded, the topsoil is replaced - after back filling with overburden - and the land reseeded in native shrubs and grasses. Herds of cattle graze on once mined land at the 13,500-acre mine. Wildlife- monitoring studies have shown there are many more deer and other wild animals and birds on the mine's reclaimed land than on the adjacent plains. Through the years, miners have found no gold at the Kemmerer Mine - they don't have the right kind of geology for that, but they have found two dinosaur footprints. One is of a baby and the other of a larger dinosaur.  P&M has preserved both of these footprints that are believed to be that of an Allosaurus. John C. Fremont could not have dreamed what lay below the prairie where he kicked that black rock in 1843 - millions of tons of high grade coal to help create the power to make good things happen.