In the 1960s, astronauts orbiting in space could discern three landmarks on the Earth: Mount Everest, the Great Wall of China and the 50-square-mile red desert that was Copperhill, Tenn.
On earth, the view was even more stark: a copper-colored and completely barren moonscape stretched as far as travelers could see on both sides of the highways that connected Tennessee and Georgia to the North Carolina mountains.
There wasn't a tree, a bush or a blade of grass. Just a sea of undulating red dirt where corrosive acid runoff was washed by every rain and breeze into two creeks that ran to the Ocoee River.
That "Great Eastern Desert" and completely dead Ocoee River bore the legacy of more than 100 years of copper mining and smelting. All that remained was the man-made wasteland that gave Copperhill its name.
By the time the astronauts saw it, the smelting had stopped and vegetation had been creeping back along the far edges for some 30 years.
Today, you'd never know it was there, and the thriving Ocoee River - completely devoid of any insect or fish life that normally signals clean water even 15 years ago - is alive again, gaining fame as an Olympic whitewater rafting course and tourist mecca.
The transformation didn't - and couldn't - happen without an intervention. A massive intervention. A $100 million federal intervention to clean up 10,000 acres on the copper mine site near the river where 11,000 pounds of acid-making metals once flowed daily into the Ocoee.
Last month, one of the nation's most remarkable acts of reclamation was celebrated with a Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency announcement of a $50 million settlement with OXY USA, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Co. and the long-defunct mine's step-parent and most recent owner. The settlement pays for about half of the cleanup cost that the government fronted in what was designed to be an alternative to a stigmatized Superfund designation.
"It's amazing what's been done at this site in just 15 years," EPA site manager Loften Carr told Times Free Press reporter David Cobb recently.
After a series of property acquisitions, Occidental - an oil company with operations around the world - became legally responsible for cleaning up the waste left behind and the creeks destroyed in the Copper Basin, even though the company never mined the site.
The river turnaround didn't materialize until 2002, when a water treatment plant was built on Davis Mill Creek. The idea was to add lime to the acidic and metals-filled water flowing into the plant, let the metals settle out, then pump the clean water back into the creek to flow to the river.
It wasn't new technology, but it had never been applied at a site of such overwhelming river devastation.
The treatment immediately reduced the amount of metals and acid flowing to the Ocoee River by 74 percent, according to EPA experts. But they wanted more, and in 2005, a second water treatment plant was built on the second metals-filled tributary, Little Potato Creek. That brought an 87 percent reduction. By 2011, with more work at some individual runoff sites around the river, regulators found they had reduced the pollution reaching the river by 98 to 99 percent.
Not bad for government work - with a little partnership from state and private agencies.