Word: rocks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Colorado's biggest mountains don't have well-defined trails to the top. So hikers scramble up the slopes any way they can, disrupting the natural drainage systems and trampling the fragile ecosystem--which includes tundra rarely seen in such abundance outside the Arctic. Where once there were rock jasmine and alpine forget-me-nots, there are now deep gullies, muddy lagoons and widespread erosion. "We are loving the Fourteeners to death," laments former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm, who has scaled 49 of them...
...mountain-loving groups, along with the Forest Service and other public agencies, has targeted 35 of the 54 peaks for restoration. Every weekend a small army of volunteers heads for the hills, blazing trails, shoring up paths and redirecting misguided streamlets. On Humboldt Peak, more than 400 tons of rock were hauled in by rope and bucket to plug a 4-ft.-deep gully that ran for a quarter-mile. On Grays Peak, a well-groomed trail to the summit will be fashioned to replace a spiderweb of paths that climbers have etched haphazardly in the tundra. On Bierstadt, which...
...days all the tunnels and shafts had to be dug with pick, shovel and explosives--backbreaking work. Now there are circular drills mounted on caterpillar treads, which lurch forward chewing at the soft rock, making a hellish racket that changes to a shrill glass-crunching scream when the teeth hit a pocket of "potch" (the gray waste near opal that runs in veins through the matrix). These drills are 4 ft. in diameter, and they create vaults in the tunnel roofs--beautiful, arched Romanesque spaces cut in the creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely...
...around them, and they don't leave the "traces" that gold or diamonds do. So it is a matter of digging and digging and digging. One spot is as good as another; the chances are always essentially the same. You can drill or pick into one spot on the rock wall and find nothing or go in 6 in. away and hit a "pocket," or lode, of opals that could be worth...
...greatest-hits album, the big sister of folk-rock country accentuates the up-tempo side of her decade-long legacy. Don't look for the cogent introspection of Only a Dream; here she has chosen songs brassy enough to be sung at the Super Bowl (Down at the Twist and Shout) or on Letterman (Can't Take Love for Granted). They sound great, as do two new anthems about the singer's favorite people: women who run risks, pay for them, keep on running. And at the head of the pack, still not breathing hard, there's Chapin...