Re: Mountains in Dragon Pass

From: Jane Williams <janewilliams20_at_...>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:50:50 +0000 (GMT)


So they have the Stormwalk Mountains about ten to twenty miles wide, with passes, and peaks over 5000 feet high? I'd be interested to hear from those with better knowledge of geography/geology than I (Joerg?), but my immediate thought is that if they're that wildly astray from standard, they're looking at absolute altitude, and the "baseline" from which those mountains arise must therefore be around 1500-2000 feet altitude, not sea level. Which seems like a reasonable assumption: max height in Snowdonia is about 3500 feet, and that's one place where you can find a mountain "range" that small, and vicious enough to be interesting (it has several of them).

It does beg the question of why anyone else in the world should give a toss about the local Californian definition of anything. A very quick google finds that while there is no formal definition of "mountain", the generic US definition is "Highest point 1000 feet or more above base." Quite how one measures "base" is an open question, but that agrees with the British definition, too, I believe, where 1000 feet is the limit. There's a rather lovely film called "The Englishman who came up a hill and went down a mountain" than hinges on this point. Any Australians out there?

The final definition given by the Wikipedia article (yes, I know, that's why I want to hear from Joerg) is "Local (radius 7 km) elevation greater than 300m, or 300-1000m if local (radius 7 km) elevation is greater than 300m" Which sounds better, covering more cases of things that obviously should, and obviously shouldn't be mountains. "Radius 7km", incidentally, is something you can get about two abreast of in the Stormwalks...

Anyway, if two people are working to one definition, and the rest of the creative community are working to another that's also a near-international standard, those two are, by definition, wrong. We just trust anything they say on the subject even less than before. End of problem.

Whether this is Gregging or just incompatable assumptions I'm not sure but there's been some discussion on the World Of Glorantha group about mountains etc.

It turns out that Greg and Jeff have been working to the Californian definition of a mountain which is a peak over 5,000 feet. How this affects anything we're doing here I'm not sure but I thought it best to let people know.

-- 
Donald Oddy
http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/


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