This latest cold snap was reminiscent of years gone-by. This is cold that pinches your nose and robs your breath as the snow crunches beneath your feet. It was common fare in Carbondale. With the cold came an odor so ubiquitous, if not pervasive, that it was part of our everyday life. The pungent smell of burning coal is eponymous with our township. It is now burned so rarely that I haven’t scented it in several years. 

Half a century later I have come to realize that we elders retain stories, if not knowledge that was not known or conveyed to our youth. Newcomers today may know nothing of the importance of local resources to our history. Not that long ago, Carbondale was a mining town. 

One of our strongest senses, the olfactory power of smell opens an entire index of memories and emotions of profound past experiences. Time and place, relationships, joys and losses can all waft out of one of those old black chimneys. Fifty years ago, “everyone” burned coal in the Valley. The cold was colder and lasted longer. The old and uninsulated miner houses that lined blocks of Carbondale were built at the turn of the last century and were extremely difficult to heat. Most of the old stoves and furnaces’ efficiencies had long expired and they struggled to keep up with the demands of the residents.

Self-feeding stoker stoves rattled and groaned as the aging augers fed the crushed coal into the firebox. Noisy, dirty and temperamental — they cranked out a lot of heat when cooperating. 

Most Carbondale houses had a coal shed in the backyard. People would put up a ton or two of local coal each fall in preparation for December and January. The carbon was sourced from the mines up Four Mile Creek, New Castle or Paonia. If you didn’t have a truck, JW Weaver would deliver anything that did kick or buck. 

You had the menu: stoker coal, nut or lump. Stoker was already crushed and fit into the auger, nut was about the size of a walnut in the husk and lump could be chunks as big as a five gallon bucket. I lived in an uninsulated 14’ x 14’ cabin in the shade along Rapid Creek. There was a chrome-clad, black Quick Meal wood cook stove parked in the cabin like an old Dodge.

I had a bow saw and a lot of youthful energy. When Chicken Charlie Niles heard I was moving to a cabin in Marble, he said, “You’ve got to have a load of coal,” and drove me to the coal yard to load his 1950 Chevy pickup truck. I would save the lump coal for an “all-nighter” which would burn long and hot and sustain coals ‘til the early morning. Breaking up the lump coal was an art; to not shatter the brittle chunk into pieces too small for the stove.

Most of the stove grates on the ranch were burned out. Old cabin dwellers had scavenged the coal from the abandoned Genter Mine just above. Genter coal was more the metallurgical coal used for coking coal to make steel and it burned so hot it melted the iron grates. This is the kind of coal extracted from Redstone’s Coal Basin.

Tend your fire well because poorly oxygenated coal fires created a thick and ugly smoke that would stifle your neighborhood. Imagine the pristine Redstone Valley with scores of coke ovens slowly burning (coking) the metallurgical coal for shipping to Pueblo. 

Coal was a dirty romance and the black soot ultimately coated all surfaces. If not diligent, coal smudge was on your hands and everything you touched, from light switches to curtains or your left cheek! Coal-burning environmentalists flexed their discretionary thresholds to stay warm. 

No matter what coal you burned, you were still burdened with the klinkers. Klinkers are the brick-like chunks left after burning the coal with its inevitable rock layers (impurities). Klinkers and fly ash are the pesky byproducts of coal firing. Fly ash is unlike the ash from your wood stove that is welcome in your vegetable garden. Fly ash can be used in concrete production but even more so presents toxic disposal challenges, especially with large coal-fired energy facilities.

Many local families prospered from coal mining; many men lost their lives. All of us have benefitted from the steel and other products or simply the heat generated by coal production. We have another by-product that coal mining left behind. Western Colorado mines still emanate tons of methane gas daily. On a cold drive through Somerset last week, methane plumes rose above the valley slopes in warm clouds. The same phenomenon exists high in Coal Basin. The Coal Basin Methane Project (CBMP) is fine tuning a proposal for capture of this gas. Mitigation is a complex prospect affecting the environment in many ways. The Crystal Valley Environmental Protection Association (CVEPA) waits as CBMP prepares a proposal for mitigation of methane this winter.

To stay informed and learn about the Crystal Valley Environmental Protection Association, visit www.cvepa.org or follow CVEPA on Facebook.