Word: valleys
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...monument to the skills of the Irish-American engineer who built it. Elegant is the word that Susan Leal, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, uses to describe the curved wedge of rock and concrete that soars 300 ft. above the floor of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. But to others, the dam, constructed nearly a century ago inside the western boundary of Yosemite National Park, is a mocking tombstone to a landscape whose haunting beauty has lain for too long beneath 100 billion gallons of water...
...landscape conjured back into being? That is the provocative question posed by an activist group called Restore Hetch Hetchy, which five years ago launched a spirited but seemingly quixotic campaign to convince the public that the time has come to get rid of the unnatural bone lodged in the valley's throat. "This was done by people, and it can be undone by people," says Restore Hetch Hetchy's executive director Ron Good...
...then there's the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado, which after its completion in 1963 not only robbed the Grand Canyon of sediment needed to rebuild sandbars and beaches but also drowned a spectacular landscape far bigger than the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Thanks to a multiyear drought that has only recently eased, the landscape has begun to re-emerge, energizing an effort by the Glen Canyon Institute to correct what conservationist David Brower called "America's most regretted environmental mistake." It's bound to be an uphill battle. The Glen Canyon Dam is part of the seven-state Colorado...
...mile stretch in Kansas on Route 4, from Geneseo to Shields, about 40 miles south of Interstate 70 is a veritable death valley. In town after town, schools have been boarded up, and the only preserved building is the American Legion post. These parts have so emptied that a turtle crossing the street has a decent shot at getting to the other side uninterrupted. Entire city blocks sell for $100 at sheriff's auctions, only to be abandoned, tax delinquent and on the block again a few years later...
...once known for tattooing the faces of their womenfolk (a custom designed to discourage neighboring Tibetans from kidnapping them as slaves). That practice has long ceased?there is only a handful of tattooed women left?but other aspects of their way of life survive unmolested in the pristine Dulong Valley in northwestern Yunnan province. You can now see for yourself, thanks to a new dirt road connecting the valley to the nearest town, Gongshan. Anthropologists need not be worried about a tourist invasion: it takes nine hours to drive this precarious 90-km track, followed by several hours of trekking...