Word: meccas
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...seem ironic that the scene of one of the world's worst environmental disasters - the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989, which released 40 million liters of crude oil into Prince William Sound - is also your gateway to great powder and exciting ski terrain. But Valdez has been a mecca for big-mountain skiing since the early 1990s, when Emily Coombs and her late husband Doug, two of America's most experienced backcountry adventurers, started Valdez Heli-Ski Guides (VHSG), valdezheliskiguides.com. They sold the company to its current owner, seasoned heli-ski guide and avalanche forecaster Scott Raynor...
...between the crisp but pliable, barely yielding quality of fresh pizza crust, especially with the telltale little scorch marks that come from passing through a real oven, and the Wonder-bread-like dough of its assembly-line rivals. As someone who grew up in Atlantic City, N.J., no pizza mecca, I still love the traditional "low-moisture" (i.e., greasy) mozzarella we all remember, the kind that forms an appetizingly orange compound as it merges with the sauce. I couldn't care less what toppings the city fathers of Naples think are canonical. But after eating good pizza - acidic sauce, unwaxy...
...groves in Southern California: miles upon miles of navel and Valencia oranges, planted in a vast swath of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which stretch from East Los Angeles to the Arizona and Nevada borders. Starting in the 1970s, that area, now known as the Inland Empire, became a mecca for a new kind of homesteader: young families lured by cheap land and an easy commute to L.A. By 2008, it was home to 4.1 million people and one of the fastest-growing regions in the country...
...just how did Aulnay - a town of 80,000 about 10 miles northeast of Paris - become a mecca for the blues and a contender for a Grammy that's previously been won by the likes of B.B. King, Etta James, Eric Clapton and John Lee Hooker? It's in part due to the town's efforts to move beyond the violence of 2005 and find a different focus and identity for its inhabitants. One manner of doing that, Beldjoudi says, was to delve into and highlight the different cultural and artistic influences that generations of immigrants had brought to Aulnay...
...Though only a fraction of Muslims are capable of making the pilgrimage, the huge crowds of worshipers that descend upon Mecca every year continually test the site's ability to accommodate their number. The Saudi Arabian government has spent billions to expand and improve the structure of the site, erecting tents to accommodate pilgrims and building multi-level pathways to eliminate congestion. Overcrowding and occasional stampedes have led to the deaths by trampling of thousands of worshippers over the years; most notably the 1990 incident where 1,426 people were crushed inside a tunnel connecting the Holy sites. While there...