The A.T. In October 1921, a forester and conservationist named Benton MacKaye, who taught at Harvard and worked for the U.S. Forest Service, wrote a seminal article in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. Titled An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning, the piece kicked off a decades-long project to create the world’s premier …
Sierra Madre Writer, director, and actor John Huston created some of the most famous pieces in film history. A few of his standouts include The Maltese Falcon, the Asphalt Junge, The African Queen, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Three of those four partnered Huston with screen legend Humphrey Bogart, including 1948’s Treasure, considered one of the greatest adventure films …
Carrauntoohil – Ireland’s High Point Ireland’s western coast is strewn with fantastic mountains. The southwestern tip of the island contains the famous Ring of Kerry, a loop that tours the Iveragh Peninsula of County Kerry. This region is a quintessentially Irish mix of rock and green. The mountains and the sea intersect in a sensory delight. Nestled …
Guadalupe Peak Redux – Texas’ High Point Around 300 million years ago, western Texas and southeastern New Mexico were covered by an inland sea, called the Delaware Basin. Over time, a reef developed around the edge of the water. In these systems, calcium carbonate from organisms with shells forms limestone rock. Sometime during the Cenozoic …
Mt. Marcy – New York’s High Point Northeastern New York is dominated by the Adirondack Mountains. Of the hundreds of summits that rise from the massif, none stretches higher into the sky than Mount Marcy. With an elevation of 5,344 feet above sea level, Marcy clocks in at 21st on the list of state High Points; it’s also the …
Artificial Intelligence [Editor’s Note: Normally, we do not replicate the prefaces to the newsletters on the website; often they do not pertain at all to the article at hand. This issue must stand as an exception. Other than the text immediately following, it’s important to add here that the article below was not edited, though …
Mauna Loa For approximately 28 million years, the Hawaiian hotspot has belched out islands and atolls. The hotspot sits in the same position, spewing upward from the mantle, while the Pacific Plate moves above it. This combination created the string we know as the Hawaiian Islands. Eight major isles comprise the archipelago. Each was once …
Mount Edgecumbe Just over 100 miles south of Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park resides a stratovolcano known to the Tlingit as L’ux. The name means “to flash” or “blinking,” a fascinating moniker for a volcano, ostensibly because the Tlingit first encountered the mountain while it produced smoke or erupted. In an interesting etymological confluence, lux is …
Pico da Neblina – Brazil’s High Point The Andes and Aconcagua, in particular, dominate the conversation about South America’s mountains. And rightly so, as the chain is the world’s longest, while the continental high point is the second-tallest of the seven large tracts of land. Yet, a continent as enormous as South America undoubtedly contains other mountainous …
Via Ferrata It’s no great secret around these parts that we are immense orophiles. Many ways exist to love mountains. We can revel in the glory of their jags and fractals or eye-inhale distant snowy caps. We can travel to their bases to crane our necks at their rises or gaze at the trees and …