If you go back to the Permian, you’d find the Appalachians, Massif Central, Atlas Mountains, and Scottish Highlands were all part of a single range cutting through the Pangean supercontinent.
Bailong Elevator , also known as the Hundred Dragons Elevator , is a glass elevator located in the Wulingyuan area of Zhangjiajie, China. It is considered to be the world’s tallest outdoor elevator, standing at a height of 1,070 feet.
If there’s an superlative example of construction project, you’ll find it in China.
The mountain stages of the Tour de France are some of my favorite events in sports. This edition of Places features a tribute to this year’s 18th stage, and one of my favorite climbs of the Alps: the Col du Galibier, a 2,600m HC beast with an epic descent on the other side.
This year’s stage route includes the Galibier and another HC fixture in Col d’Izoard, also last seen in the 2017 edition when Warren Barguil had a memorable mountaintop finish there.
I browse maps all the time, panning around in Google Earth whenever I want to look something up, favoriting things along the way. I thought I’d start documenting some of those here.
The Richat Structure is a circular geologic dome formation in the Mauritanian Sahara. I actually saw this when I was panning around the desert looking at the striated mountains you can see going from east to west toward the Atlantic. The whole structure is about 20 miles in diameter, and looks completely alien and out of place in the desert.
Earlier this week I finished reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, his account of climbing Mount Everest and surviving the 1996 Everest disaster. The book reads like a thriller, giving the account of how an expedition team prepares for the climb, including the experience in country beforehand and acclimatization process for weeks leading up to the climb.
While reading it, I found myself wishing I had the visual aid of maps of the route, photos of the camps, and what certain of the landmarks (like the dangerous Khumbu Icefall) actually look like. This video gives a good sense of the monumental scale of the challenge of climbing the 29,000’ peak.
If you need your daily dose of palm sweating, check out this clip of a climber rappeling down nearly the entire height of El Capital in one motion. Free dangling by 1500’ of rope 50 feet from the wall is just terrifying. But man is that view of Yosemite Valley from that vantage point a thing of beauty.
