A rush of cold air greets Glenn Yost as he opens the door to the old mine. The shaft inside, abandoned for more than 40 years, is full of cool, crystal clear water, which brings a grin to Yost's face.

"Do you feel how cold that is?"

A few feet away, the water trickles out from a natural spring. Yost walks to the stream and comes up with a handful of water.

"See how clean that is?"

A pipe, a few feet from Yost and the stream, uses gravity to send water to a small facility, about a mile away. There workers use the water to harvest a rare fish that is native to the Yukon. It's called Arctic char.

For about three years, Yost said, he and his business partners, all with ties to the coal industry, have counted on that coldness and that purity. The company, West Virginia Aqua LLC, processes 500,000 pounds of fish a year, up from 200,000 in 2001.

"We've got a use for these old abandoned mines," Yost said. "We [coal companies] may take natural resources, but we do give something back. There is life after coal mining."

There are thousands of abandoned coal mines in West Virginia, hundreds with water pure enough to harvest fish, Yost said. The partners are Yost's company, W.W. McDonald Land Co., Dingess Rum Properties and International Industries. The product is called Isis Arctic Char.

The $2.5 million facility where the fish are harvested -- known as a growout -- is about two years old. The company buys fertilized eggs from a Canadian company, hatches them at a facility leased from the Mingo County Redevelopment Authority, and harvests them at the growout.

At the growout floor -- which is about the size of a football field -- Yost explains the process. He stands in front of huge open-air fish tanks, which sort of resemble above-ground swimming pools. Most of them are 20-feet-by-6-feet, but a few are 30-by-8.

Arctic char usually grow at 7 degrees, but the partners have found the fish grow faster between 14 and 15 degrees, Yost said. Looking from one tank to another, it's easy to see the growth, which occurs during an 18-month period. Fish come to the growout at about 50 grams and grow to about two pounds, Yost said. A two-pounder produces an eight- to 10-ounce filet.

"The thing about Arctic char is that they're tolerant to high density," Yost said. He looks down in a tank, where fish swirl around, almost on top of each other. A fish jumps up, splashing Yost. "Now you see some density."

It wasn't easy to build the growout, Yost said, because there wasn't a template to follow. The company recirculates 95 percent of the water, unlike most operations, Yost said. No one, that he knows of, has used water from mines in such a way. There's always at least one worker at the growout, Yost said, to watch for mechanical problems.

The company sells filets for about $6 a pound. Whole fish sell for $3.50 a pound.

"We're not competing against other people," Yost said. "We're the only people that we know of that produce Arctic char in the entire United States."

Government-subsidized fish growers in Iceland are the primary competition, Yost said. Those companies use brackish water -- where salt and fresh water meet -- which changes the color and taste of the fish.

But because West Virginia Aqua is trying something so new, there's no existing market. That makes it riskier, Yost said.

"A lot of people don't think we're for real yet," Yost said, when asked if anyone had tried to follow the company's lead. "They think the jury's still out."

West Virginia Aqua is primed to tap more mines in the area and build another growout, Yost said.

"We're 500 miles from two-thirds of the U.S. population," Yost said. "That's the key: We can process today and deliver tomorrow."

At trade shows, such as the one Yost attended in May in Chicago with the West Virginia Department of Agriculture, people often are puzzled by the type of fish West Virginia Aqua sells. Those people often ask if it's salmon, because both fish are pink. They have a hard time believing it's actually Arctic char, that it's native to the Yukon, and that the company is from West Virginia.

But Yost said he isn't offended. A former McDowell County miner, he sometimes has a hard time believing it himself.

"I never imagined I'd be a fish farmer," he said. "Back when I started, this type of thing never would have crossed anybody's mind."

(c) 2003, The Charleston Gazette, W.Va. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

Raising Arctic Char in a coal mine