Over a century ago, the forester Benton MacKaye imagined the Appalachian Trail not as a footpath but as a tool for restructuring rural futures across a mountain range.
His vision included a western spur, never built, that would have crossed the coal country of the Pennsylvania Alleghenies; where the eastern trail became a protected commons, this other Appalachia became its inversion — a landscape of extraction, of company towns and strip mines. Taking up that unfinished ambition, the studio turned to the post-extractive landscapes of the West Branch Basin of the Susquehanna, in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, one of the most mine-scarred and polluted watersheds in the nation. Amid acid mine drainage, intensifying floods and fires, and new energy proposals reinscribed onto the region's extractive infrastructures, students worked from the ground up with local partners to reimagine its roads, rivers, mine lands, and powerline corridors as the backbone for regenerative economies and ecologies — reparative futures built on stewardship and self-sufficiency rather than extraction.
Red Runs Trail advances that ambition as a regional reclamation framework for the post-coal landscapes of the Moshannon Creek watershed. Confronting abandoned mine lands, acid mine drainage, fragmented access, and economic decline, it stitches mine features, treatment areas, and abandoned railroad corridors into a single public landscape system — one that moves, across three linked sites, from recreation on reclaimed spoil ground, to the interpretation of extraction and remediation as heritage, to treatment landscapes that turn underground mine seepage into productive ground for stewardship, learning, and renewable energy.
