Word: mountainous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...biggest employer in the county is the "Tiki" mines: Martiki, Pontiki and Toptiki. The mines are all owned by Mapco, a Tulsa. Okia energy firm, which traditionally names all its mining operations after the Polynesian good-luck "Tiki" dolls. Martiki is the second largest mountain-top strip mine in the United States and therefore probably the world, shipping almost 3 million tons of coal each year. Martiki officials are clearly proud of their operation and sincere in their excitement at the prospect of resulting the landscape. Martiki's 18,000 acres cover two mountains on opposite sides of a steep...
...uninitiated, full-scale coal-mining is an incredible sight. Two hundred feet below where the hillside was a few years ago, dump trucks bigger than houses haul 175-ton loads of rock. The Martiki mining operation is centered around the "Mountain Mover," a power shovel about the size of a small airplane hanger. The shovel's huge bucket--which can easily hold a pickup truck--takes 76-cubic-foot bites out of the mountain 24 hours...
...four days, the heaviest blizzard to hit the High Sierra in 30 years deposited 12 ft. of snow. Near Lake Tahoe, vacationers and mountain residents were stranded when major highways were closed, many blocked by snow slides. Several homes had been crushed by sliding snow masses; one California highway patrolman was buried briefly in his squad car near Truckee, Calif. Throughout the surrounding mountains, avalanche patrols used explosives and 75-mm howitzers to blast away dangerous snow formations, trying to keep pace with the blizzard and avert a catastrophe...
Fortunately, Columbia's computers knew where they were. After streaking across Arizona and New Mexico, the delta-winged craft emerged right on target at the sprawling, mountain-rimmed missile testing grounds. Columbia then made a wide right turn, aligned itself with one of the desert runways and plunged downward at breathtaking speed, dropping at an angle seven times steeper than that of a commercial jet. At 4,000 ft., its fall was accelerated by a fluke wind that caused the speed brakes in the shuttle's rudder to retreat automatically. Finally, only 143 ft. off the ground, Lousma...
...kinds of snow abound in Colorado: powder for the slopes and powder for the nose. According to a state survey, a quarter of the people at ski resorts like Aspen ("Toot City") have got their Rocky Mountain highs from cocaine. So it is appropriate that Colorado also boasts the country's only clinic of its type exclusively for coke abusers. Operated by the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, it has been extraordinarily successful in helping people kick the habit. Its principal method? Self-blackmail. The abuser, who comes to the clinic voluntarily and usually in desperation...