People in the Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 517

FIGURE 10.16 A former coal mining community, Canmore, Alberta, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains,
has become an important tourist, recreation, amenity migration, and service center. (Photo by J.
S. Gardner.)
An irony in the mountain world is that many old mine sites and communities, some
long abandoned, have reemerged as important contributors to other forms of livelihood.
Potosi still operates as a mine but is visited by as many tourists as miners. Former moun-
tain mining towns like Aspen, Telluride, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Canmore, and
Fernie, to name several in the United States and Canada, are mainstays of tourism,
recreation, and amenity migration (Fig. 10.16). Furthermore, the mining town of Po-
tosi, Bolivia, the former mining towns of R0ros, Norway, and Sewell, Chile, and the
now abandoned Humberstone and Santa Laura mines, also in Chile, have been declared
UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Forestry
Most mountain regions are characterized by various types of forest, influenced by alti-
tudinal ecological zonation and local topography, soil, climate, and moisture conditions.
Mountain forests have been and remain one of the principal sources of fuel, timber,
and paper products globally. The harvesting of trees for these products has been an im-
portant source of livelihoods for mountain people for millennia, first when trees were
used for construction and fuel, and later when they were harvested to serve national
and global markets seeking wood products and paper. As noted earlier, this commenced
as early as 500 B.C.E. in some mountain areas of Europe and the Middle East, 1300 in
southwest China, 1800 on the south slope of the Himalaya, and since the late nineteenth
century in the Cordillera of North America. Prior to the highly mechanized harvesting