Word: terrain
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...offensive, when it begins in earnest, will largely be conducted on foot. That's because the terrain surrounding Marja is latticed with canals built by the U.S. a generation ago to expand agriculture to 250,000 acres in the Helmand River valley. It also gave the region the nickname "Little America." The canals and ditches created a network of bridges unable to support armored vehicles and gives the Taliban good places to hide IEDs - the top killer of U.S. troops in Afghanistan - and snipers. They also turned the region into lush farmland that has proven ideal for growing opium-producing...
...fishing port of Valdez. It may 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...
...snow and terrain are not inducements enough to head to Alaska, then consider that your trip may well include sightings of soaring golden eagles, gigantic moose, mountain goats, otters, seals and possibly even an orca in the bay. The ice-climbing is world class, as are the skiers and boarders who congregate from all parts of the globe to test themselves on the steepest skiable pitches and the finest snow to be found anywhere. It doesn't matter where you may have skied or boarded before - the Chugach will make your jaw drop. As Doug Coombs famously said, "Everything else...
...Martin has a wilder reputation from its recent past: for years it was a bastion for the rebels of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and the much more violent Maoist fighters of the Shining Path. Hand in hand with subversion came drug trafficking, with the surrounding countryside perfect terrain for coca, from which cocaine is processed. (See pictures of what the world eats...
...short, opposite sides of a mountain may have different climates, even though they're close to each other. In areas with varied terrain including lots of hills, therefore, hospitable conditions might be available relatively nearby. "That was the unexpected message," says Loarie, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. "There's lots of buffering capacity in heterogeneous landscapes...