Mount Rainier – Washington’s High Point Mount Rainier is one of the most famous, striking, and prominent peaks in the United States. This beast of a crag racks up an impressive list of superlatives. At 14,417 feet above sea level, the mountain is the High Point of Washington, as well as the eponymous National Park in which she […]
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Hoverla – Ukraine’s High Point Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe. For American audiences, the nation is just smaller than the state of Texas. The country in Eastern Europe is not renowned for its mountains, but a region that big is bound to have some interesting topography. The continent’s third-longest mountain chain – the
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The Presidential Range [note: for an interactive, whimsical map depicting the Presidential Range, point your browser here] The Appalachian Mountains stretch approximately 1,500 miles from Alabama into Canada. Along that varied distance, geologists carve them into subranges, amongst which are the White Mountains. This range covers a large portion of New Hampshire and
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Xiaohaituo Mountain and the Beauty of Snow The 2022 Olympic Winter Games are underway in Beijing, China. The cold iteration of the Olympics evokes the natural world a bit more to my imagination than the summer version. Mountains, snow, ice, skiing. If you’re familiar with the skyline of Beijing, you know the horizon is not
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Spruce Knob – West Virginia’s High Point If the state of West Virginia had not presciently decided to move away from the wickedness of slavery during the Civil War, its High Point would be about 250 miles south-southwest at Mount Rogers, near the Virginia tripoint with North Carolina and Tennessee. Instead, the good citizens
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The Lion Mountains The mountain range known as the Lion Mountains, whose highest point is Picket Hill at just under 3,000 feet, is located on the Atlantic coast entirely within what nation? This trivia question stumped me. The Atlantic Coast is the first clue. That info restricts our answer to North America, South America, Europe,
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The World’s Highest Helipad In the previous issue, we explored a charming creature with a name I originally thought must have been fabricated to sound like the name of another animal. However, numbats are more than just a name that evokes a wombat, they are bonafide members of our planet. Today’s topic could form a
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The Sirens of Titan Join me on a trip toward the outer reaches of our solar system. On the voyage, we’ll mix metaphors from two fantastic authors. I think the conflation we’ll make might be acceptable to one of them. Maybe both! In 1959, Kurt Vonnegut published his second novel. Setting the tone for his
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Mount Doom and the Crags of Mordor In our previous issue, we explored Mont Blanc, Western Europe’s High Point and the tallest peak in the Alps. After visiting the “White Mountain,” it seems fitting in this Halloween season to travel next to a place with a diametrically opposed name. Translated from the native language of
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Mont Blanc Today we travel to the border of France and Italy, to the crown of the Alps. The highest point in that famed mountain range and all of Western Europe is Mont Blanc. Meaning “white mountain” in French, the crag’s Italian name is Monte Bianco. Rising 15,774 feet above sea level, both countries