Word: mosses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...British pilots in a Vickers Vimy biplane in 1919, the race had 390 entrants from ten countries competing for $144,000 in prizes in such bizarre categories as the best performances by a Swiss or a resident of New York State. The contestants included onetime Racing Car Champion Stirling Moss and a chimp named Tina, who was vying for honors as "most meritorious performance by a Commonwealth citizen." For all of them, the hardest part was not the flying but getting to and from the check-in stations atop the Empire State Building in New York and the General Post...
...outskirts of Fairbanks--an overgrown frontier town that is the closest thing to civilization in Alaska's 400,000 square-mile interior. Throughout August, the distant fires still created a persistent haze and a strong smell of pine incense. At any moment, lightning could ignite the dry moss in a forest much closer to home and destroy some section of the town, but the pool of trained firefighters was nearly exhausted. Besides local volunteers, firefighters from Montana, Idaho, and other Western states and laborers from the local prison were pressed into service on the fires, but the U.S. Bureau...
Like many fires in Alaska, however, this 20,000-acre blaze proved to be unspectacular. It smoldered in the foot-deep carpet of moss above the permafrost, slowly charring the sparse timber as it advanced. To contain this fire, helicopters would ferry the men to points along the perimeter, where the crew would hack trenches out of the moss and fell the trees for 20 feet on either side to prevent burning limbs from dropping across the fire line...
...only one piece of fresh meat. The men's bodies quickly became caked with accumulations of sweaty soot, but no one had the energy or the tolerance of cold to wash in the glacial streams at night. It became almost impossible to keep feet dry in the spongy moss. On the fire lines, the thick gritty smoke dried throats out quickly every morning, but the quart of rationed water had to last for ten hours, so most men simply endured the dryness...
...often takes trees 70 years to reach a diameter of four inches. They are "useful" only for pulp, but the nearest roads for a hypothetical pulp mill are often hundreds of miles from any particular forest. The fires' contribution to air pollution is only temporary, and the grass and moss burn so in- completely that humans' fire trenches may cause as much erosion as the fires...