There is place in a wide crater in a landscape otherwise dominated by flat white snows, sloped sheets of ice that trick the eye, and the long forbidding grey slopes of mountains. There are steel structures built into the rim of the crater, some attempt to shelter it from the winds, if only somewhat. It's not obvious from a distance. A wide field of fallen trees rings the center of the area, blown over and blasted to the ground.
There are some wrecks of buildings, and a few scattered piles of supplies, dumped or left here from some mysterious sort - stacks of wood debris and crates, a few twisted piles of steel, a few large piles of coal. Carefully surveying the site, there is what seems to be an exposed seam of coal and iron in the distance, conveniently close to each other. This is in fact precisely why the area was chosen, coal and steel access being deemed essential.
In the very center of the clearing is a large flat area, perhaps sixty meters wide. There is an array of odd pipes and valves stuck into the ground on this flat part, with three large metal pieces resting near the center. They are obviously badly damaged, blackened and twisted lumps. And there are quite a number of wrecked and burnt buildings surrounding the flat area in expanding rings- Mostly destroyed three-story houses, with bent steel frames and burnt wood. A few storage areas, bunkhouses, and administration-type buildings, and a tall workshop that is somewhat intact. There might be signs of violence, though it's hard to tell that apart from the general fire and collapse damage.
There's a graveyard, easily missed at first out in the snow. There are eighty-three graves.
A goodly amount of English writing can be found eventually, not that anyone is leaving a journal. There's some on personal effects left recognizable even after the fires - old photos and portraits, handwritten letters, a few pieces of machined clothing, the odd monographed watch or locket or cup, a strange (broken, nearly torn in two) device seemingly meant to be carried like a backpack. Some of the abandoned tools have labels, and the workshop still has less important notes and collected data. What tracks there were to see where the survivors went are long buried in the snow.
The 'streets' that remain are six feet across, made up of neatly laid out wooden planks over a run of frozen-solid pipework. These branch off into some of the buildings, leading to metal grids - presumably for heating - and are broken in dozens of places, a chaotic and mostly unplanned system. There are places where furnaces or boilers may have once stood and been removed. There are also outlets on the pipes here and there, small ones perfectly sized for a port on the strange device and large ones that match the steel fittings on some of the bigger pieces of wreckage.
Finally, stuck fast half-embedded into an ice slope at the side of the crater and mostly covered in snow, there's some sort of steel bodied truck, frame bent and cords holding the odd cargo of some large ring-shaped machine very securely. The device has a short hose made of thick woven wool and a thin layer of PVC, and a prominent pipe fitting shaped exactly like the outlets of the road-pipes on the end.