The author describes his personal experiences with three ways of dealing with the Earth once its protective, life-bearing skin is peeled back. The focus of his experience with reclamation art, an activity as puzzling as it is controversial. He grew up in a small town on the shores of the Mediterranean in Spain, a country known for its mines since the dawn of history. Later he moved to Calgary, in Canada's West, where there also was a building boom, and of much greater dimensions. On weekends he often went for hikes or cross-country ski trips in the nearby Rocky Mountains. Sometimes he would go to Kananaskis Country, the provincially-run buffer zone to Banff National Park, to hike up Mt. Allan, a mountain that on one side had become the site of a controversial Olympic ski development.