Excerpt from Mineral Resources of the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area, Grant, Randolph, and Tucker Counties, West Virginia The Dolly Sods Wilderness Area includes about hectares within the Monongahela National Forest, Tucker, Grant, and Randolph Counties, W. Va. The area is in the Allegheny Mountain section of the Appalachian Plateaus and is at the extreme eastern edge of the Appalachian coal region. Dolly Sods, the source of the area name, is an upland meadow that was used for the summer grazing of cattle by early settlers. All surface and mineral rights are held by the u.s. Forest Service. About 490 m of sedimentary rock of Late Mississippian to Late Pennsylvanian age crop out in the trough of the broad, gently folded Stoney River syncline. The basal 213 m of the exposed rock sequence is characterized by an abundance of grayish-red Shale, silty shale, and siltstone that are distributed along the lower valley slopes bordering Red Creek and its major tributaries. The rest of the exposed stratigraphic section is a coal bearing sequence of sandstone, siltstone, shale, and underclay that includes prominent cliff and ledge-forming conglomeratic sandstone beds. Coal, the principal mineral resource of the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area, is of low to medium-volatile bituminous rank and is found in at least seven beds. Of these, four beds are of sufficient thickness and extent to contain coal resources, which total about 36 million metric tons. Coal reserves, estimated to be approximately million metric tons, are limited to two beds. Development of the coal resources of the Dolly Sods area consists of several Shallow adits, which provided fuel for locomotives during early logging opera tions, and one abandoned truck mine. Peat, Shale, clay, sandstone, and natural gas are potential mineral resources in the area but are of minor commercial interest. Evidence of economically important metallic deposits was not found during this investigation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.