LITTLE STONEY FALLS -- They rolled out of tents and truckbeds to gather around a wood fire. While some boiled coffee and cooked grits in a blackened pot, others roasted canned biscuits on a stick.

Tattooed, pierced and driven by the zeal of young people combating what they see as a great injustice, these environmentalists, anarchists and bicycle advocates are the foot soldiers of Mountain Justice Summer.

They are back in Southwest Virginia this summer with a more permanent base of operations and a more focused approach in their fight against mountaintop removal coal mining.

Last year, Mountain Justice Summer brought hundreds of people to Appalachia's coalfields. In West Virginia and Kentucky, they joined with indigenous organizations opposed to a mining process that uses explosives and heavy equipment to tear away earth to get at the coal beneath. In Tennessee, Mountain Justice Summer provided the nucleus for an anti-mountaintop organization that prompted a state review of mining practices. That led to Gov. Phil Bredesen signing a law tightening water pollution regulations around strip mines in Tennessee.

In Virginia, where there were no organized local groups, the activists tried to gauge attitudes and knit together some kind of coalition. But the activists -- mostly young and mostly from somewhere else -- had very uneven success.

"I think they learned a lot of organizing strategy last summer," said Darren Riedlinger, a Virginia Tech graduate student from Maryland who plans to take part in this year's Mountain Justice Summer campaign.

This year, Riedlinger said, the group seems more focused. It's recruiting on college campuses -- including Tech, Radford University and Roanoke College -- but it's recruiting organizers more eagerly than activists, according to Riedlinger.

"An effective organizer organizes himself out of a job," Riedlinger said. "That's really what we're trying to do. Get in there and start out maybe being a catalyst but hopefully by the end of the summer get to where we're not even needed in that community."

A house near Dungannon, in Scott County, will be headquarters for the Virginia campaign, so volunteers won't have to go rough camping on national forest land. Bill McCabe, an environmental justice organizer with the Sierra Club, is working with a fledgling local group, the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, based near the town of Appalachia.

"What I do is work at the behest of the community or community groups," McCabe said.

He'll be working on education, learning more about locals' opinions of mountaintop removal mining, and planning events including an Earth Day commemoration. But locals will dictate the shape of the campaign, he said.

"There's a real awareness from the Mountain Justice Summer folks that you have to respect the local norms and standards," McCabe said.

As "a gesture of respect for local culture and custom," a recent e-mail cautioned potential volunteers that "local organizers tell us that mainstream clothing and a non-provocative appearance are needed to work effectively in this community."

Dink Shackleford, executive director of the Virginia Mining Association, lives in the community McCabe wants to organize. Shackleford grew up in the mining community of Keokee, the son of a mine company owner.

He dismisses Mountain Justice Summer as well-meaning but misinformed.

He calls the activists weekend environmentalists. They visit nature. They don't live in it. So they can't understand it.

At one rally, Shackleford said, "I saw five or 10 college professors and I saw about 110 misguided kids 17, 18 years old that you can't even hardly get mad at when you see them.

"They're so young. You know they don't know what they're talking about."

Mountain Justice Summer relies heavily on college-age and twentysomething volunteers, but its numbers include many people eligible for AARP membership. Some of the movement's most prominent spokespeople are grandparents.

Shackleford gives locals who support Mountain Justice Summer even less credit than he gives the activists.

"The people who are doing the complaining are the people who can afford to complain," he said.

They get their living out of a mailbox, Shackleford said. They're retired or receive disability payments so they don't have to worry about what the loss of mountaintop mines would do to the economy.

That's not universally true, but Shackleford says it with the conviction of a man preaching Gospel.

Angela Honeycutt, a young mother who lives near the town of Appalachia, said her opposition to mountaintop removal springs from a fear that her community could join the list of former coal camps that have been swallowed by strip mines.

"I don't see them stopping until they get everything here," she said. "I just don't understand how they can destroy a whole end of a state and nothing gets done. ... I don't understand why nobody's doing nothing to help nobody down here."

Danny Dollinger, who spoke during a recent Mountaintop Removal Road Show stop at Roanoke College, said mountaintop removal mining could be stopped if more people realized the damage it does,

"When it catches the consciousness of America, mountaintop removal will be stopped," he said. "The only question is how many lives will be ruined in the meantime."

The end of one life -- the death of 3-year-old Jeremy Davidson -- has become a rallying point for the anti-mountaintop removal movement. It's also a symbol of the difficulty Mountain Justice Summer has had establishing itself in Virginia's coalfields.

Davidson was killed in his bed when a bulldozer pushed a half-ton rock off a mine site above his home. The rock rolled more than 600 feet, crashed through the Davidsons' house and crushed the toddler in his sleep.

Dennis and Cindy Davidson, the boy's parents, weren't at the protest march held after Jeremy's death. Organizers didn't tell them about it, the Davidsons said.

The Davidsons weren't at the march marking the anniversary of their son's death, either.

"We just keep our distance from that," Cindy Davidson said.