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Aug. 30, 2005 I have passed through a number of mountain ranges, including the Pamirs, the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps, the Tian Shan (Tien Shan) and others. Although perhaps many Americans are unaware of the Pamirs, they constitute one of the loftiest ranges in the world, almost as high as the Himalayas and spanning northward from the Himalayas across Central Asia towards China and Russia, where they merge with the western spurs of the Tian Shan. Depending on how you draw your map, the entire region can be considered a single super-range. In fact the whole system of mountains from the Himalayas, including the Altais, the Tian Shan, the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, the Elburz, the Carpathians, and the Alps, westward to the Pyrenees, might be considered one great trans-Eurasian massif and watershed. I went by bus, train and car through the Pamirs and the Tian Shan, and I also flew over parts of the them. Mount Ismail Samani is the tallest in the range at 24,590 feet, about 10,000 feet taller than Pike’s Peak. Other towering summits in the region are Pobeda, Khan Tenggri, Korzhenevski and Lenin, all above 20,000 feet and all taller than Alaskas’s Mount McKinley, the highest peak in the Rockies. I don’t think that I saw any of these particular peaks, at least from the ground, and I couldn’t say which peak I did see was the highest. But in any case, they present an awesome spectacle. Surely, the most beautiful range I ever saw was the Zaliisky Alatau Mountains, which are part of the Tian Shan range in Kazakhstan, but Talgar Peak rises only to about 16,500 feet. The view from Alma Ata is nothing short of spectacular. As for the Andes, last year I traveled through the Colombian, Ecuadorean and part of the Peruvian ranges. The highest mountain along the way was Mount Chimborazo, in Ecuador, also over 20,000 and outtopping Mount McKinley just a little. Mount Aconcagua, the giant of the range, is in Argentina, and though I spent 5 months in that country, I wasn’t near the Andes. My thinking at the present is to go back to Argentina in December, and perhaps this time to pass through the city of Mendoza, near Aconcagua, on my way to Chile. The Colombian Andes are absolutely gorgeous, but differ from the Zaliisky Alatau in being green to the summits in most places that I saw. In this case though, I was right in the mountains instead of looking from afar, and this provides an entirely different perspective. I also got a chance to see Iztaccíhuatl-Popacatépetl, snow-covered twin volcanoes, near Puebla, México on my way back. I’ve been in the Rockies in the US twenty or more times, but I haven’t visited the highest peaks. Truchas in New Mexico may be the tallest one I’ve seen, but the Rockies are anticlimactic after the Pamirs and the Andes. I passed through the Alps in Europe too, on several occasions, breathtaking but secondary on a world scale. One thought that kept occurring to me when I saw these mountains, and mind you I had never even heard of intelligent design at that time, was that, for all their majesty and glory, mountains are mostly wasteland from the human standpoint. Surely montane thaws create a number of important rivers. I saw rivers springing from the heights of Tian Shan when I overflew. But rivers form with or without mountains. For example, the world’s mightiest river, the Amazon, has a low-lying catchment area, and the Mississippi rises mostly in the American plains. So what good are mountains? As much as I love scenery, geography and travel, I couldn’t help thinking that It would be far more beneficial to the human race, if someone could command the mountains to go cast themselves into the sea. Then there might be fruited plains, and little villages, with happy, chubby children playing in the Sun, perhaps less stunning and magnificent to behold, but much more satisfying to my sense of justice and benevolence. But mountains are immovable, so no Messiah comes to move them! And children still go hungry, and no Messiah comes to feed them. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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