Darrington, Washington remains a small mountain town, its natural beauty intact as a gateway to the North Cascades. The dominating presence of Whitehorse—named for the equine-shaped glacier on the mountain’s north face—towers above town to the southwest; the clear waters of the Stillaguamish and Sauk rivers establish boundaries to the west and east, respectively. Yet the ebb and flow of natural resource extraction, that so frequently determines the fate of rural communities, eventually caught up with Darrington, just as it had in western North Carolina decades prior.