Word: alaskas
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...mountain climbers the news over Memorial Day weekend was grim but not really surprising. At Yosemite Valley in California, the body of Derek Hersey, a renowned Alpinist whose unforgiving specialty was rock-wall climbing done solo and without the protection of belays, was found below Sentinel Peak. And on Alaska's Denali (Mount McKinley), descending unroped in darkness down an icy chute called Orient Express, Charles Cearley, 40, a mountaineer from Seattle, fell 3,000 ft. and died...
...contrarian will point out, reasonably, that if you don't insist on Denali, you can have the rest of Alaska's mountains to yourself. Complete solitude is a little harder to find in the Lower 48, but it's there, at least in the West. If you are willing to carry your house on your back, turtle-fashion, the entire Western high country is yours for ski mountaineering. Perhaps because tent, stove, food, fuel and avalanche beeper weigh 65 to 70 lbs., you and your partner are likely to have the horizon to yourself, with (the thought occurs spontaneously after...
...pointing out that the only true Americans are the descendants of the diverse tribes found by Columbus and Cortes when they first arrived in the New World. That's wrong, of course. Even North and South American Indians had immigrants for ancestors: northeastern Asians who crossed from Siberia to Alaska in prehistoric times across the bridge of land that then spanned the Bering Strait...
...when did these adventurous souls reach Alaska? What kind of people were they? How fast did they spread down through the Americas? For decades, archaeologists felt sure they knew the answers: the first Americans were skilled hunter-gatherers and toolmakers who arrived about 11,500 years ago and moved rapidly southward, reaching deep into South America within about five centuries as well as helping drive to extinction such prehistoric mammals as mastodons and woolly rhinos...
...have had to cross the Bering land bridge many thousands of years earlier. That would have been no problem, but heading south from there would have been tough: ice sheets -- or the inhospitable terrain they left behind -- cut off virtually all access to the bulk of North America from Alaska between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago. Guidon's rather controversial answer: maybe the immigrants came over to South America in boats directly from Asia...