Altitude Short Quotes

Big Mountains are a completely different world. You can not conquer them, only rise to their height for a short time; & for that they demand a great deal. The struggle is not with the enemy, or a competitor like in sports, but with yourself, with the feelings of weakness & inadequacy. That struggle appeals to me. It is why I became a mountaineer.

Try this one,' said Jack, 'and I'll say it just one time. Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life. You wouldn't do it, Ennis, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everything built on that. It's all we got, boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you don't never know the rest. Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years. Measure the fuckin short leash you keep me on, then ask me about Mexico and then tell me you'll kill me for needin it and not hardly never gettin it. You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I'm not you. I can't make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You're too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.

In the verbal conflagration of a Shakespeare and a Shelley we smell the ash of words, backwash and effluvium of an impossible cosmogony. The terms encroach upon each other, as though none could attain the equivalent of the inner dilation; this is the hernia of the image, the transcendent rupture of poor words, born of everyday use and miraculously raised to the heart’s altitudes. The truths of beauty are fed on exaggerations which, upon the merest analysis, turn out to be monstrous and meaningless. Poetry: demiurgical divagation of the vocabulary. . . . Has charlatanism ever been more effectively combined with ecstasy? Lying, the wellspring of all tears! such is the imposture of genius and the secret of art. Trifles swollen to the heavens; the improbable, generator of a universe! In every genius coexists a braggart and a god.

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngàje Ngài,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

In virtue of our sin, we are, in short, like perfectly well-formed creatures living in an environment that is not good for us. The oxygen-rich environment, in which we were made to live, has now been transformed by our sin into a high altitude one that asphyxiates and enervates us.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes — some of which have a large sale.

The philosophic exercise is not fruitful; it is merely honourable. We are always philosophers with impunity: a metier without fate which pours voluminous thoughts into our neutral and vacant hours, the hours refractory to the Old Testament, to Bach, and to Shakespeare. And have these thoughts materialized into a single page that is equivalent to one of Job’s exclamations, of Macbeth’s terrors, or the altitude of one of Bach’s cantatas? We do not argue the universe; we express it. And philosophy does not express it.

When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely. The city had accommodated itself to winter, there was good wood for sale at the wood and coal place across our street, and there were braziers outside of many of the good cafés so that you could keep warm on the terraces. Our own apartment was warm and cheerful. We burned boulets which were molded, egg-shaped lumps of coal dust, on the wood fire, and on the streets the winter light was beautiful. Now you were accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky and you walked on the fresh-washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg gardens in the clear sharp wind. The trees were beautiful without their leaves when you were reconciled to them, and the winter winds blew across the surfaces of the ponds and the fountains were blowing in the bright light. All the distances were short now since we had been in the mountains. Because of the change in altitude I did not notice the grade of the hills except with pleasure, and the climb up to the top floor of the hotel where I worked, in a room that looked across all the roofs and the chimneys of the high hill of the quarter, was a pleasure. The fireplace drew well in the room and it was warm and pleasant to work.

Make a List (or lists) • Make a list of all the things that you can look at and think: Why did we even bother to move that the last time? Now will be your last and best chance to give or throw away unwanted items until your next move (5-7 years on average). Give unwanted clothes, furniture, kitchen items, etc. to a charity that allows you to use your donation as a tax write-off. Yard sales are another option. • Make a list (and/or get one online) of household hazardous materials. These are common items in your home that are not or might not be safe to transport: flammables like propane tanks (even empty ones), gasoline or kerosene, aerosols or compressed gases (hair spray, spray paint), cleaning fluids in plastic containers (bleach, ammonia) and pesticides (bug spray) and herbicides (weed killer) and caustics like lye or pool acid. There is more likely to be damage caused by leakage of cleaning fluids-- like bleach--than there is by damage caused by a violent explosion or fire in your truck. The problem lies in the fact that any leaking fluid is going to drip its way to the floor and spread out--even in the short time span of your move and more so if you are going up and down hills. Aerosols can explode in the summer heat as can propane BBQ tanks. Gasoline from lawnmowers and pesticide vapors expand in the heat and can permeate everything in the truck. Plastic containers that have been opened can expand and contract with a change in temperature and altitude and crack.

What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’ There is an obvious response to this: doesn’t it rather depend on which corpse you consider interesting in the first place? Yes, a little over 5,000 years ago someone walking through the Alps left the world of the living with an arrow in his side; but there’s no particular reason to treat Ötzi as a poster child for humanity in its original condition, other than, perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument. But if all we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosen the much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (after the Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a moment to consider what it would mean if we did this. Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15 Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case. When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).16 If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short. We’re not suggesting we actually do this. As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction – easy, but frankly not too enlightening.

For starters, of the four so-called weapons of mass destruction, three are far less massively destructive than good old-fashioned explosives.272 Radiological or “dirty” bombs, which are conventional explosives wrapped in radioactive material (obtained, for example, from medical waste), would yield only minor and short-lived elevations of radiation, comparable to moving to a city at a higher altitude. Chemical weapons, unless they are released in an enclosed space like a subway (where they would still not do as much damage as conventional explosives), dissipate quickly, drift in the wind, and are broken down by sunlight. (Recall that poison gas was responsible for a tiny fraction of the casualties in World War I.) Biological weapons capable of causing epidemics would be prohibitively expensive to develop and deploy, as well as dangerous to the typically bungling amateur labs that would develop them.

In a matter of sixty short minutes, that thing could whisk Neil away to civilization, I thought. Hmm. My goodness, that was a beautiful prospect. Somehow I had to get on that chopper with him. I packed in thirty seconds flat, everything from the past three months. I taped a white cross onto my sleeve, and raced out to where Neil was sat waiting. One chance. What the heck. Neil shook his head at me, smiling. “God, you push it, Bear, don’t you?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “You’re going to need a decent medic on the flight,” I replied, with a smile. “And I’m your man.” (There was at least some element of truth in this: I was a medic and I was his buddy--and yes, he did need help. But essentially I was trying to pull a bit of a fast one.) The pilot shouted that two people would be too heavy. “I have to accompany him at all times,” I shouted back over the engine noise. “His feet might fall off at any moment,” I added quietly. The pilot looked back at me, then at the white cross on my sleeve. He agreed to drop Neil somewhere down at a lower altitude, and then come back for me. “Perfect. Go. I’ll be here.” I shook his hand firmly. Let’s just get this done before anyone thinks too much about it, I mumbled to myself. And with that the pilot took off and disappeared from view. Mick and Henry were laughing. “If you pull this one off, Bear, I will eat my socks. You just love to push it, don’t you?” Mick said, smiling. “Yep, good try, but you aren’t going to see him again, I guarantee you,” Henry added. Thanks to the pilot’s big balls, he was wrong. The heli returned empty, I leapt aboard, and with the rotors whirring at full power to get some grip in the thin air, the bird slowly lifted into the air. The stall warning light kept buzzing away as we fought against gravity, but then the nose dipped and soon we were skimming over the rocks, away from base camp and down the glacier. I was out of there--and Mick was busy taking his socks off.

In a matter of sixty short minutes, that thing could whisk Neil away to civilization, I thought. Hmm. My goodness, that was a beautiful prospect. Somehow I had to get on that chopper with him. I packed in thirty seconds flat, everything from the past three months. I taped a white cross onto my sleeve, and raced out to where Neil was sat waiting. One chance. What the heck. Neil shook his head at me, smiling. “God, you push it, Bear, don’t you?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “You’re going to need a decent medic on the flight,” I replied, with a smile. “And I’m your man.” (There was at least some element of truth in this: I was a medic and I was his buddy--and yes, he did need help. But essentially I was trying to pull a bit of a fast one.) The pilot shouted that two people would be too heavy. “I have to accompany him at all times,” I shouted back over the engine noise. “His feet might fall off at any moment,” I added quietly. The pilot looked back at me, then at the white cross on my sleeve. He agreed to drop Neil somewhere down at a lower altitude, and then come back for me. “Perfect. Go. I’ll be here.” I shook his hand firmly. Let’s just get this done before anyone thinks too much about it, I mumbled to myself. And with that the pilot took off and disappeared from view. Mick and Henry were laughing. “If you pull this one off, Bear, I will eat my socks. You just love to push it, don’t you?” Mick said, smiling. “Yep, good try, but you aren’t going to see him again, I guarantee you,” Henry added. Thanks to the pilot’s big balls, he was wrong. The heli returned empty, I leapt aboard, and with the rotors whirring at full power to get some grip in the thin air, the bird slowly lifted into the air. The stall warning light kept buzzing away as we fought against gravity, but then the nose dipped and soon we were skimming over the rocks, away from base camp and down the glacier. I was out of there--and Mick was busy taking his socks off. As we descended, I spotted, far beneath us, this lone figure sat on a rock in the middle of a giant boulder field. Neil’s two white “beacons” shining bright. I love it. I smiled. We picked Neil up, and in an instant we were flying together through the huge Himalayan valleys like an eagle freed. Neil and I sat back in the helicopter, faces pressed against the glass, and watched our life for the past three months become a shimmer in the distance. The great mountain faded into a haze, hidden from sight. I leaned against Neil’s shoulder and closed my eyes. Everest was gone.

Taking quick looks behind him on the trail, Lew Basnight was apt to see things that weren’t necessarily there. Mounted figure in a black duster and hat, always still, turned sidewise in the hard, sunlit distance, horse bent to the barren ground. No real beam of attention, if anything a withdrawal into its own lopsided star-shaped silhouette, as if that were all it had ever aspired to. It did not take long to convince himself that the presence behind him now, always just out of eyeball range, belonged to one and the same subject, the notorious dynamiter of the San Juans known as the Kieselguhr Kid. The Kid happened to be of prime interest to White City Investigations. Just around the time Lew was stepping off the train at the Union Station in Denver, and the troubles up in the Coeur d’Alene were starting to bleed over everywhere in the mining country, where already hardly a day passed without an unscheduled dynamite blast in it someplace, the philosophy among larger, city-based detective agencies like Pinkerton’s and Thiel’s began to change, being as they now found themselves with far too much work on their hands. On the theory that they could look at their unsolved cases the way a banker might at instruments of debt, they began selling off to less-established and accordingly hungrier outfits like White City their higher-risk tickets, including that of the long-sought Kieselguhr Kid. It was the only name anybody seemed to know him by, “Kieselguhr” being a kind of fine clay, used to soak up nitroglycerine and stabilize it into dynamite. The Kid’s family had supposedly come over as refugees from Germany shortly after the reaction of 1849, settling at first near San Antonio, which the Kid-to-be, having developed a restlessness for higher ground, soon left, and then after a spell in the Sangre de Cristos, so it went, heading west again, the San Juans his dream, though not for the silver-mine money, nor the trouble he could get into, both of those, he was old enough by then to appreciate, easy enough to come by. No, it was for something else. Different tellers of the tale had different thoughts on what. “Don’t carry pistols, don’t own a shotgun nor a rifle—no, his trade-mark, what you’ll find him packing in those tooled holsters, is always these twin sticks of dynamite, with a dozen more—” “Couple dozen, in big bandoliers across his chest.” “Easy fellow to recognize, then.” “You’d think so, but no two eyewitnesses have ever agreed. It’s like all that blasting rattles it loose from everybody’s memory.” “But say, couldn’t even a slow hand just gun him before he could get a fuse lit?” “Wouldn’t bet on it. Got this clever wind-proof kind of striker rig on to each holster, like a safety match, so all’s he has to do’s draw, and the ‘sucker’s all lit and ready to throw.” “Fast fuses, too. Some boys down the Uncompahgre found out about that just last August, nothin left to bury but spurs and belt buckles. Even old Butch Cassidy and them’ll begin to coo like a barn full of pigeons whenever the Kid’s in the county.” Of course, nobody ever’d been sure about who was in Butch Cassidy’s gang either. No shortage of legendary deeds up here, but eyewitnesses could never swear beyond a doubt who in each case, exactly, had done which, and, more than fear of retaliation—it was as if physical appearance actually shifted, causing not only aliases to be inconsistently assigned but identity itself to change. Did something, something essential, happen to human personality above a certain removal from sea level? Many quoted Dr. Lombroso’s observation about how lowland folks tended to be placid and law-abiding while mountain country bred revolutionaries and outlaws. That was over in Italy, of course. Theorizers about the recently discovered subconscious mind, reluctant to leave out any variable that might seem helpful, couldn’t avoid the altitude, and the barometric pressure that went with it. This was spirit, after all.

Tell you what, we coulda had a good life together! Fuckin' real good life! Had us a place of our own. But you didn't want it, Ennis! So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain! Everything's built on that! That's all we got, boy, fuckin' all! So I hope you know that, if you never know the rest! You count the damn few times we have been together in nearly twenty years and you measure the short fucking leash you keep me on - and then you ask me about Mexico and tell me you'll kill me for needing somethin' I don't hardly never get! You have no idea how bad it gets! I'm not you, I can't make it on a coupla high-altitude fucks once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you.

Himalayan travel is of course full of complexities. The shortness of the season during which expeditions are possible, the uncertainty of the monsoon, the danger of land-slips, endemic cholera and other diseases of the lower valleys, leeches and insect pests, extremes of heat and cold, altitude, local superstitions and the consequent difficulty in obtaining help from the natives – these are but a few of the obstacles to be overcome by the traveller.

There is only one unsolved case of hijacking in US aviation history - that of DB Cooper. A man, actually going by the name of Dan Cooper (it was later reported incorrectly by the media) bought a one-way ticket for flight 305 between Portland International Airport and Seattle, Washington. Shortly after take-off, Cooper whispered to an air stewardess to take a note from him, and that he had a bomb. The note requested she sit next to him and that he was hijacking the place. She did as told, and with some trepidation asked to see the bomb. Cooper opened up his briefcase enough the stewardess to see eight red cylinders in two rows. He gave her his demands - $200,000, four parachutes (two main and two reserve) and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the aircraft as soon as it landed. This was communicated to the pilot, who in turn made the authorities aware of the situation. When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper let all of the passengers go in exchange for the money, which the FBI had quickly assembled from nearby banks. As the plane was being refuelled, Cooper discussed his intended flight plan with the cockpit crew; he made a number of requests about altitude, direction, and even the position of the aircraft’s wing flaps. He also requested that the aircraft take off with the rear staircase deployed, however the captain refused - yet Cooper said he would lower it himself once they were airborne. Eventually, the aircraft took off, Cooper politely asked the remaining flight steward to join the crew in the cockpit and close the door. He did so, and at around 8pm the pilot saw the warning sign that the rear stairs had been lowered, and he and the rest of the crew felt a change in air pressure, indicating that the rear door had been opened. Dan Cooper - or whoever he was - had parachuted out with the money. He has never been found, and no additional information about the case have ever since come to light!

Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research: “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.” A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes? But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My

What we have learned about genes has allowed us to understand that we are not so much things merely existing in the world as beings in constant interaction with the world. If you took this idea to an extreme and imagined that you grew up on another planet, the essentially dynamic nature of animal building by genes and environment might mean you'd look very different. Cloned plants that have exactly the same genome can look like very different specimens if planted at different altitudes. In the same way, if you had grown up on a planet with lower gravity or one that was more distant from the sun and had a lower oxygen concentration, you might be incredibly tall, or short, or weedy, or blind...or maybe you'd have a supersized brain. If you took your African ape genome and cultured it on yet another planet, maybe the resulting you would have translucent skin. The point is that although we experience ourselves in some sense as finished or perfected, we are not in any way intended. There is no blueprint for what humans are meant to be. And as this moment is merely one moment in the past and future history of our evolutionary lineage, your life right now is merely an instant in the past and future history of the interaction between your genome and your environment.

Neil’s feet were still numb from the frostbite. Long exposure up high, sat waiting in the snow for all those hours at the Balcony, had taken their toll. At base camp, we bandaged them up, kept them warm, and purposefully didn’t discuss the very real prospect of him losing his toes. He didn’t need to be told that he was unlikely ever to feel them again properly. Either way, we realized that the best option for them was to get him proper medical attention and soon. There was no way he was going to be walking anywhere with his feet bandaged up like two white balloons. We needed an air-evacuation. Not the easiest of things in the thin air of Everest’s base camp. The insurance company said that at dawn the next day they would attempt to get him out of there. Weather permitting. But at 17,450 feet we really were on the outer limits of where helicopters could fly. True to their word, at dawn we heard the distant rotors of a helicopter, far beneath us in the valley. A tiny speck against the vast rock walls on either side. In a matter of sixty short minutes, that thing could whisk Neil away to civilization, I thought. Hmm. My goodness, that was a beautiful prospect. Somehow I had to get on that chopper with him. I packed in thirty seconds flat, everything from the past three months. I taped a white cross onto my sleeve, and raced out to where Neil was sat waiting. One chance. What the heck. Neil shook his head at me, smiling. “God, you push it, Bear, don’t you?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “You’re going to need a decent medic on the flight,” I replied, with a smile. “And I’m your man.” (There was at least some element of truth in this: I was a medic and I was his buddy--and yes, he did need help. But essentially I was trying to pull a bit of a fast one.) The pilot shouted that two people would be too heavy. “I have to accompany him at all times,” I shouted back over the engine noise. “His feet might fall off at any moment,” I added quietly. The pilot looked back at me, then at the white cross on my sleeve. He agreed to drop Neil somewhere down at a lower altitude, and then come back for me. “Perfect. Go. I’ll be here.” I shook his hand firmly. Let’s just get this done before anyone thinks too much about it, I mumbled to myself.

Shara met me at the airport in London, dressed in her old familiar blue woolen overcoat that I loved so much. She was bouncing like a little girl with excitement. Everest was nothing compared to seeing her. I was skinny, long-haired, and wearing some very suspect flowery Nepalese trousers. I short, I looked a mess, but I was so happy. I had been warned by Henry at base camp not to rush into anything “silly” when I saw Shara again. He had told me it was a classic mountaineers’ error to propose as soon as you get home. High altitude apparently clouds people’s good judgment, he had said. In the end, I waited twelve months. But during this time I knew that this was the girl I wanted to marry.

Shara met me at the airport in London, dressed in her old familiar blue woolen overcoat that I loved so much. She was bouncing like a little girl with excitement. Everest was nothing compared to seeing her. I was skinny, long-haired, and wearing some very suspect flowery Nepalese trousers. I short, I looked a mess, but I was so happy. I had been warned by Henry at base camp not to rush into anything “silly” when I saw Shara again. He had told me it was a classic mountaineers’ error to propose as soon as you get home. High altitude apparently clouds people’s good judgment, he had said. In the end, I waited twelve months. But during this time I knew that this was the girl I wanted to marry. We had so much fun together that year. I persuaded Shara, almost daily, to skip off work early from her publishing job (she needed little persuading, mind), and we would go on endless, fun adventures. I remember taking her roller-skating through a park in central London and going too fast down a hill. I ended up headfirst in the lake, fully clothed. She thought it funny. Another time, I lost a wheel while roller-skating down a steep busy London street. (Cursed skates!) I found myself screeching along at breakneck speed on only one skate. She thought that one scary. We drank tea, had afternoon snoozes, and drove around in “Dolly,” my old London black cab that I had bought for a song. Shara was the only girl I knew who would be willing to sit with me for hours on the motorway--broken down--waiting for roadside recovery to tow me to yet another garage to fix Dolly. Again. We were (are!) in love. I put a wooden board and mattress in the backseat so I could sleep in the taxi, and Charlie Mackesy painted funny cartoons inside. (Ironically, these are now the most valuable part of Dolly, which sits majestically outside our home.) Our boys love playing in Dolly nowadays. Shara says I should get rid of her, as the taxi is rusting away, but Dolly was the car that I will forever associate with our early days together. How could I send her to the scrapyard? In fact, this spring, we are going to paint Dolly in the colors of the rainbow, put decent seat belts in the backseat, and go on a road trip as a family. Heaven. We must never stop doing these sorts of things. They are what brought us together, and what will keep us having fun. Spontaneity has to be exercised every day, or we lose it. Shara, lovingly, rolls her eyes.

Of the early founders, the most eminent proponent of physical geography as a scientific entity was undoubtedly the German polymath Alexander von Humboldt. On his many travels, he combined observations with measurements of temperature, pressure, and the Earth’s magnetic field, and made generalizations about the geographical distribution of vegetation, global-scale patterns of temperature (depicted by isotherms on maps), the ways in which temperature falls and vegetation varies with increasing altitude (on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, for example), the alignment of volcanoes, and the course of ocean currents. In his major works, written around the middle of the 19th century, such as Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe , published in 1849, he emphasized not only relationships within the natural geo-ecosphere but also linkages to human societies. A year earlier, Mary Somerville, based at the University of Oxford, published Physical Geography and defined the subject as ‘a description of the Earth, the sea and the air, with their inhabitants animal and vegetable, of the distribution of these organized beings and the causes of that distribution’.

The short term effects of very high altitude ‘Summit Brain’ tend to progress into long term neurological and physical impairments.

Be that as it may, the problem of human squeamishness at having an A-bomb explode overhead could be addressed. Simply explaining to soldiers that a nuclear detonation at 10,000 feet was not the same as having it go off at 1,000 feet was true but insufficient. To the soldiers it was a matter of degree. At the high altitude there would be no ground disturbance. No radioactive dust kicked up into a mushroom cloud, no neutron activation of the ground, and negligible fallout. It was all a function of range. The fission neutrons could not travel that far in air before they decayed into hydrogen gas, and the gamma ray pulse would be short-lived and dissipated in a spherical wave-front with a diameter of four miles when it hit the ground.

Steven Magee, Chartered Electrical Engineer, was medically diagnosed with Amnestic Disorder which is characterized by short term memory loss in 2016 at the age of 46. He had worked for five years on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA from 2001 to 2006 and had noticed memory problems developing during the last years that he worked there. The condition has now progressed into a disability.

I started showing depression symptoms shortly after my very high altitude coworker stated that they were experiencing gender issues.

Altitude sickness, also known as mountain sickness, is caused by a lack of oxygen at great heights. Symptoms include headaches, dizziness, and shortness of breath. Climbers traveling up Mount Erebus train for days by climbing to gradually increasing heights.

Aerovías Cuba Internacional was a small, separately owned airline, sometimes confused with Aerovías Q or Cubana. Two months after its origin, the company attempted to expand its flights to Spain, naming it the “Route of Columbus,” Ruta de Colón. The Cuban-owned four-engine DC-4 carried the American registration N44567 and required five people in the cockpit to fly it. Flying the shared Havana-Madrid route, it crashed on February 6, 1947, at an altitude of 4,593 feet in the “Sierra de Gredos,” a mountain range in central Spain that is located in the Province of Ávila, approximately 100 miles west of Madrid. All 12 people aboard were instantly killed. It was shortly thereafter that Aerovías Cuba Internacional went out of business.

Afancy party on the Fourth of July feels un-American. We should be gathered around a grill or open fire, wearing shorts and tekkies, toasting weenies and drinking beers from cans. A proper South African braai would feel more patriotic. My reflex is to tighten my bun or pull my hair out and redo it. It’s a nervous habit I’ve had

Next to You is a standalone Romantic Comedy/New Adult Romance about a rugby player and an heiress in Aspen. Stan and his man bun first appeared in the Modern Love Story Short, Take for Granted. This is a full-length novel told in dual POVs.

This is what daily working is like at the very high altitude Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO): Get the workers up the mountain as fast as possible with a short stop for breakfast. Tell the workers to take the company supplied drugs to do their jobs and get the sickened workers off the mountain as fast as possible at the end of the work day. The sickened workers spend their evenings feeling really crappy and repeat the cycle again the next day.

You’re going to let me drive the Rover? You sure you didn’t hit your head?” “I’ll be in the backseat, watching and judging your every move.” I open the back passenger door and awkwardly hop inside, trying to not knock my ankle against anything. The tightness of my boot tells me my ankle is swelling rapidly. Landon drives like an old woman while Easley gives him shit as his co-pilot. Every turn and bump in the road on the short drive from Buttermilk

Tibetans also discovered a niche that was almost uniquely their own: collecting medicinal herbs. Herbs were commonly used in both Chinese and Tibetan medicine, and many of the more valuable were found on the Tibetan plateau. Beimu, an alpine lily used to treat coughs, grew at altitudes of more than 10,000 feet, and Tibetan nomads were perfectly situated to collect it. Most lucrative was Cordyceps sinensis, a prized ingredient in traditional medicine, believed to boost immunity, stamina, and lung and kidney function. Tibetans call it yartsa gunbu, meaning “summer grass, winter worm,” or simply bu, “worm,” for short. The worm is actually a fungus that feeds on the larvae of caterpillars. In the past, the worm was commonplace enough that Tibetans would feed it to a sluggish horse or yak, but the Chinese developed a hankering for it that sent prices soaring. Chinese coaches with gold-medal ambitions would feed it to athletes; aging businessmen would eat it to enhance their sexual potency. At one point, the best-quality caterpillar fungus was worth nearly the price of gold, as much as $900 an ounce. Tibetans had a natural monopoly on the caterpillar fungus. Non-Tibetans didn’t have the local knowledge or the lung capacity to compete. The best worm was in Golok, northwest of Ngaba. Nomadic families would bring their children with them, sometimes taking them out of school because their sharp eyesight and short stature allowed them to more easily scan the ground for the worm amid the grasses and weeds. The season ran for approximately forty days of early spring, the time when the melting snow turned the still-brown hills into a spongy carpet. The families would camp out for weeks in the mountains. In a good season, a Tibetan family could make more in this period than a Chinese factory worker could earn in a year. The Communist Party would later brag about how their policies had boosted the Tibetan economy, but the truth was that nothing contributed as much as the caterpillar fungus, which according to one scholar accounted for as much as 40 percent of Tibetans’ cash earnings. Unlike earnings from mining and forestry, industries that came to be dominated by Chinese companies, this was cash that went directly into the pockets of Tibetans. The nomads acquired the spending power to support the new shops and cafés. The golden worm was part of a cycle of rising prosperity.