There aren't many places in the United States where you drive on the left side of the road, but Usibelli Coal Mine is one of them. When you arrive at the gates to the mine in Healy, Alaska, you have to switch to the left because that makes it easier for the drivers of the 150-ton Caterpillar 785 haul trucks to get a clear view of the road. And when you are passing by a 150-ton truck loaded with coal, at the wheel of a small car, avoiding a head-on collision is a priority. In such a case it certainly isn't the truck that would take the brunt of the damage.

As coal is lighter than the dirt these trucks were designed for, Usibelli maintenance crews added tailgates so they can handle a larger volume of material. The company has five of these trucks in its fleet, plus two 95-ton capacity Dresser HaulPak trucks. Recently Usibelli ordered another truck at a price of $1.8 million, but it will take about 13 months to be delivered because demand for mining equipment is so high at the moment.

Usibelli has come a long way since it began operations 60 years ago with an International TD-40 dozer and a converted GMC logging truck. The dozer, which isn't much bigger than some of today's lawnmowers, has been restored by Usibelli employees, painted bright red, and put on display outside the office and shop building. Italian immigrant Emil Usibelli's surface mining efforts were viewed skeptically at first by underground miners, but he proved his critics wrong, founding a family business that is one of the most well-known fixtures in Interior Alaska.

Today several members of the Usibelli family are involved with the running of the company and its subsidiary, Usibelli Energy, which is exploring for natural gas.

Joe Usibelli Jr., Emil Usibelli's grandson, is now company president.

Many of the mine's 90 employees who are not officially part of the Usibelli family have perhaps begun to feel as if they are.

Almost one-third of them have been with the company for more than 20 years.

Like Bob Engleman, for example, who performs transmission maintenance in the shop.

He started out as an oiler, servicing equipment in the field, 36 years ago.

"This type of work is challenging, it's technical, it's the kind of thing I like to do," he told Mining News.

Healy just north of Denali Park

Steve Denton, Usibelli's vice president for business development, also typifies the kind of loyalty the company inspires.

A lifelong Alaskan who grew up partly in Anchorage and partly in Fairbanks, he has now settled in between the two.

Visitors from the Lower 48 and even some Anchorage residents might wonder what attracts people to Healy, population 1,000, a quiet town just north of Denali Park.

Denton enjoys rural life and seems a little surprised to be asked about it.

"We've been part of a small community for a long, long time," he said.

"It wasn't all that long ago that the business and the community were the same thing.

We want to do things in a way that meshes with the community as a whole."

Usibelli has never had difficulty finding people who want to work at the mine: "What's hard is finding people with experience," Denton said. "The pipeline gave us a large trained workforce - now that's running out. ... I wish the unions could be a little more active in working through the vocational hurdles, facilitating the quality of employees." About half of Usibelli's employees belong to the Teamsters Union. There hasn't been a strike at the mine for over three decades, according to Denton.

Two Bull Ridge now being mined

There is much more Usibelli history yet to write. In the past few years the mine gradually transferred its operations from its 25-year producing Poker Flats location to a new site two-and-a-half miles away, Two Bull Ridge. This location is believed to contain enough coal to support Usibelli's current operation for another 25 to 30 years.

Two Bull Ridge was named by John Wood, a Usibelli engineer back in the 1970s, and now a project manager with the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. In 1972, when Wood was 25 years old, he went on a moose-hunting trip with Usibelli shop foreman Leo Mollier. They climbed the ridge and spotted three huge bulls. "Leo and I each chose our moose and commenced firing, the flash from the rifle shots several feet long in the twilight," Wood wrote recently in the journal of the Alaska Miners Association. "After the shooting stopped we discovered that we had bagged two of the largest-bodied 60-plus inch moose either of us had ever seen!"

Two years later Wood explored the same area for coal, and drill holes revealed multiple thick seams with favorable overburden characteristics. It didn't take Wood long to come up with the name for the home of the "massive moose and massive coal reserves" - although he was rather amused that "Two Bull Ridge" was adopted officially.

Ace-in-the-Hole now at Two Bull Ridge

Usibelli's towering dragline, the Ace-in-the-Hole, has kept its name (chosen by local children) since "walking" from card game-inspired Poker Flats to Two Bull Ridge. At a rate of one step per minute, covering seven feet with each step, it took five days for the dragline with its 225-foot mast and 325-foot boom to get to the new site in 2002. "The boom goes from end zone to end zone on a football field," Usibelli's chief engineer, Alan Renshaw, told Mining News.

The dragline has to be plugged into the power system by means of a cable. Its buckets are big enough to park a truck in, and can move 33 to 37 cubic yards of dirt at a time. Their teeth are constantly being replaced, because of the amount of work they do, even though they are made from special reinforced metal.

The dragline has put in about 85,000 hours of work, shifting overburden, since 1978 and this piece of equipment can be expected to last for 215,000 hours, on average. Replacing it would cost $26 million. When Usibelli equipment has to be repaired, new parts are manufactured in the shop. It would take too long to order replacements from the manufacturer, so the company keeps shelves and drawers full of the most commonly-needed parts, and replicates the others.

Power plant at mouth of mine

The coal goes to a mine-mouth power plant operated by Golden Valley Electric Association, and to cogeneration plants in the Fairbanks area, as well as being taken by rail to the port at Seward for export. "In 2003 China stopped exporting coal and the international markets became open," Bill Brophy, Usibelli's vice president for customer relations, told Mining News.

Usibelli is happy with its ongoing contract to supply coal to Korea and its test shipments to Chile, but "the best way to move coal is on a wire," Brophy said. With the power needs of Alaska's Railbelt increasing daily, Usibelli is promoting its Emma Creek Energy Project - a plan to build another mine-mouth power plant - and also talking with Matanuska Electric Association about building a power plant in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, north of Anchorage. Then there is the possibility that the mothballed Healy Clean Coal Project could receive an injection of funds to go into operation (see sidebar). One way or another, Usibelli has a long way to go before it runs out of steam.