The question worth asking on any open plain is what is stopping the trees, because something is. Here are seventeen answers.
1. The Rainfall Squeeze
The basic temperate grassland occupies…
The pattern across all of these is the same trade: more character, less predictability. What follows is what each category is actually like rather than how it photographs. Here are…
Every pass is a compromise between height and distance: the lowest crossing point is rarely the shortest route, and the route that everyone took is whichever combination was survivable. Here…
The feature that makes a fjord a fjord is the sill at its entrance - a shallow threshold of rock and debris left where the glacier terminated. Water inside is…
What makes these places worth visiting is not the spring itself but what a community does when free heat is available indefinitely. The answers are remarkably consistent. Here are ten.…
The logic is consistent wherever it appears. Put the settlement on ground that is hard to attack, above the bad air of the valley floor, and on rock that would…