The post-extracted landscape of the slate quarries along the border of southwestern Vermont and eastern New York provides an opportunity to investigate how the extremely different, yet overlapped scales of ecological succession and geological time, both expressed through the act of quarrying, can be utilized to create sense of place for a community facing rapid economic and cultural shifts away from a historic way of life based on the slate industry. Rather than seeing these scarred post-extracted landscapes as disrupted ecologies needing to be fixed (reclaimed, repaired, restored, or rewilded), they should be seen as important remnants of a waning place-based identity. The former Cedar Mountain Quarry becomes the site of design investigation. As a result of the quarrying process, not only has the physical matter of the land been altered, but the landscape of the rubble piles is in a state of perpetual disturbance and arrested ecological succession. It is almost as if geological time, which functions in scales of hundreds of millions of years, has been imposed into the timescale of ecological succession which is typically hundreds of years. This overlapping and collapse of timescales accentuates the spatial and experiential (phenomenological) qualities of the quarry. Controlled succession becomes a design medium. This condition of simultaneous timescales (thick time) is embodied in the unique layered and metamorphosed materiality of the slate, and physical matter of the accumulated waste piles and the void of the extracted quarry pit, as is the cultural timeframe and legacy of 200 years of this economy and trade that defined the local community. The uncertain shape and dynamic topography of this post-extracted landscape is a result of efficiencies and specifics of the quarrying processes, tools, and skills that are tailored to the irregular, fractured landscape of the local slate geology. These same skills and tools that defined the landscape and cultural identity of the area can be employed in the design language as the tools of creation of the new site from which to base a new Sense of Place.