Like the barren surface of the moon, the crest of Cabin Mountain stretched out in a desolate field of rock. Botanist Harry Allard came across this stark image when he walked in the wastelands of Grant County’s spruce forests following an era of intensive logging and roaring forest fires. The life and death of West Virginia’s high altitude valleys is a story of a hidden boreal ecosystem, the transformative harvest of the forest, and its devastating aftermath, leaving little but the seeds for a hopeful rebirth.