Word: waterway
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When they dipped their oars into the Missouri River and started rowing west through Indian country almost 200 years ago, the captains were looking for something they would never find--because it wasn't there. The Northwest Passage, the fabled missing link in a continuous navigable waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, existed only in the explorers' minds, but its image was enough to move them forward, and that was enough to alter history. Their adventure, like most great ones before and since, was born of equal parts hope and ignorance, sustained by fortune and determination, and consummated...
...dams profoundly altered the character of the Missouri, evening out its pulse--the naturally occurring spring rises and summer drops--and capturing much of the silt that gave the waterway its nickname "Big Muddy." The dams offered protection to some 1.4 million acres of rich, river-hugging farmland, curtailed damaging floods and made it possible to hem in the shifting riverbanks with miles of concrete levees and retaining walls. And for the 10 million inhabitants now living and working along its 2,341-mile path, the multitasking Mo is a source of drinking water, electricity and irrigation and a resource...
...worst time. It's very hard to dodge the rocks." And indeed, it was white-knuckle stuff in some sections, where the river narrowed dramatically between towers of scoured rock. Vicious eddies buffeted and sucked at the boat as we bobbed perilously close to hull-ripping crags. The waterway's violence was apparent everywhere; shipwrecks bleached on the banks alongside vast uprooted trees...
...stuck. For 13 months, the decommissioned behemoth has been marooned in the Black Sea waiting to be towed to Macau, where it's slated to become a floating casino. Turkey won't let it go?ostensibly because it could sideswipe houses along the Bosphorus Strait, even though the waterway is 700 m wide at its narrowest. Politics is the more likely culprit. Some lawmakers worry that China?which has been looking to buy an aircraft carrier for a decade?might want to refit the ship for military use. It was sold for $20 million in 1998 before it was finished...
Vacationing by houseboat was largely unheard of 30 years ago. But in the past decade, houseboat rentals have surged to the point where reservations are often booked a year in advance. At our destination of Lake Powell--a serpentine waterway straddling Arizona and Utah--fewer than two dozen houseboats were available for rent 30 years ago; today there are 400. One reason for their popularity is that houseboating offers a novel way to see some of the most spectacular scenery in the country. Plus, houseboats offer family and friends an opportunity to be under way while under one roof...