Following the Trucks — A Heat Island Register Podcast

Just before midnight, a human-caused fire started northwest of Eureka, Utah. Within four minutes, the sky went from twilight blue to black. Six days later, ash was still falling in Salt Lake City. The wind blew the smoke north and held it in the valley.

This episode follows the wire — from Utah coal country to Kentucky underground, to the northernmost town on Earth, to the undersea cables that carry every AI query encoded as light. Michelle traces her own arc through the supply chain she's spent thirty years marketing — network infrastructure, Verizon's undersea cables, Adobe's AI platform — and finds the Energy Loop Scenic Byway running through the middle of it.

Coal: Book One of the Fuel the Future Trilogy, by Michelle Baldwin. Narrated by John Coleman.

When coal burns, it doesn't disappear. It becomes ash — fly ash carrying arsenic, mercury, selenium, lead, and boron. Boron moves through water. Into soil. Into groundwater. Into farms. The arc from power plant to holding pond to groundwater isn't a hypothetical. It's infrastructure.

This episode follows the wire from Skyline Mine to the twins — Hunter and Huntington power plants in Emery County — through the ownership chain that runs from Utah Power & Light to PacifiCorp to Berkshire Hathaway Energy to Warren Buffett's shareholder letter. It follows the coal ash to Tennessee, the cleanup workers to Perry County, Alabama, and the transmission lines still running west. A holding company in the Cayman Islands owns the mine. Coal: Book One of the Fuel the Future Trilogy, by Michelle Baldwin. Narrated by John Coleman.

Winter Quarters Canyon sits at the end of a road with no address in Carbon County, Utah. In 1900, it was the site of one of the deadliest mining disasters in American history. Two hundred men died on a single morning. The coal dust was dry. It should never have been that dry.

Michelle Baldwin tried to reach Winter Quarters three times. A locked gate. A dry lakebed. Two overgrown inroads cut for mule trains that stopped coming decades ago. She stopped. All three times.

On July 15, 2026, a DOGM inspector tried the same road. The ranch padlock was on the gate. Canyon Fuel's lock had been removed. The inspector noted it and moved on.

The government couldn't get in either.

This episode follows one argument repeated across 149 years: 1877, 1900, 1924, 1984, 2007, 2026. Each disaster produced a law. Each law prevented the previous disaster. The mountain kept finding new ways.

Following the Trucks is a Heat Island Register Podcast. Written by Michelle Baldwin. Hosted by John Coleman.

Reclamation is a legal status. 

The mountain says Tuesday. 
A spring emerges mid-slope.
Outfall 005.
Iron at twice the permitted limit. 

The revegetated meadow at White Oak mine sits above coal that was never extracted. 

Federal BLM conducted an Environmental Impact Statement to expand the adjacent Skyline mine into 120 new acres.

The meadow was not an ending. 
It was an intermission. 

Episode 4 of 12. Following the Trucks.
📍White Oak Mine. Electric Lake. Flat Canyon.

Full account in Coal: Book One, Fuel the Future series. Publication forthcoming. heatislandregister.substack.com

What is the Skyline Mine — and who owns the coal fueling the supply chain behind the AI data center on the edge of the Great Salt Lake?

The answer is in Carbon County, Utah. The top of Eccles Canyon. Two eyes in the face of the mountain.

The Skyline Mine opened in 1981. The ownership changed five times in forty years — from a California utility to a Cayman Islands limited partnership managed from Geneva, backed by the University of Texas endowment, with Trafigura as a direct investor. Trafigura pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges in March 2024.

The mine extracted 150 million tons of coal from a seam nine feet deep — one story tall. The void left behind covers fifteen square miles. Two-thirds the area of Manhattan. One story tall. Empty.

The mine flooded on January 28, 2026. Water entered at 15,000 gallons per minute. The general manager wrote to the state: the mine will be lost. Very somber day. Sincerely, Jeff.

The coal is still there.

Episode 3 of 12. The full account is in Coal: Book One of the Fuel the Future Trilogy, publication forthcoming.

Subscribe free at heatislandregister.substack.com for the written version of this work, field reporting, and updates on the book.

What happens when you follow a truck to the end of the road?

Carbon County, Utah. The morning after Site 10. She made coffee. At nine o'clock, the trucks started again.

She drove toward them.

Helper, Utah sits at the bottom of Eccles Canyon — named not for a person but for a machine. The helper engines that pushed coal trains up a grade too steep for a single locomotive. The town became the help.

At the mouth of the canyon: a loadout silo. A unit train staged on Sunday waiting for Monday's haul. A pipe conveyor threading through the canyon ten feet above the ground — raised in 1993 to allow the local elk herd to pass underneath without interruption.

The coal goes over them. The elk go under.

The supply chain comes into focus.

Episode 2 of 12. The full account is in Coal: Book One of the Fuel the Future Trilogy, publication forthcoming.

Follow the Heat Island Register at heatislandregister.substack.com for the written version of this work, field reporting, and updates on the book.

What powers AI data centers today? Even people who work in AI don’t know. Michelle Baldwin found out — after she followed a truck she didn’t recognize.

September 2025. Scofield Reservoir, Carbon County. Upper Colorado Basin, Utah. She went camping to unplug from her job marketing AI software. She found unmarked trucks instead — sealed, double-trailer B-trains repeatedly running a highway she had never been to before. Interior Region 7. 

In the morning, she followed the road.

This is the episode where nothing happens yet. The question that becomes the book is asked here, at a picnic table, watching pelicans land on water that tasted of snowmelt and mine drainage from the canyon above. She didn’t know that yet.

Episode 1 of 12. The full account is in Coal: Book One of the Fuel the Future Trilogy, publication forthcoming.

Follow the Heat Island Register at heatislandregister.substack.com for the written version of this work, field reporting, and updates on the book.