Comparing highs
Last night lightning stopped play. This
was both disappointing and encouraging; disappointing because I was
just hitting my snowboard stride, powering down the powdery slope in
ridiculously poor visibility, but encouraging that the local ski
centre didn't want to see its customers fried in a freak drag lift
accident. Seeing lightning flash through heavy falling snow was a new
experience. We know the prevailing wisdom is don't be on high,
exposed places at such times so we headed inside for another hot
chocolate.
Ranč is our local ski centre. We know
it's a mountain but it's easy to think of it as the local hill. It
was the combination of questions from my brother and getting a
G-Shock watch with an altimeter for my birthday that got me
interested in finding out how high this “hill” really is. I took a
reading on my watch at the top, I cross referenced it with an
accurate (higher) figure from the internet. 1463m. For someone more
used to measuring mountains in feet (ft) I wasn't sure how impressive
this was. 4800 ft, however, I understand.
During a Skype call with my brother we
started comparing this to The Three Peaks in the UK. Ben Nevis is the
biggest; it's 4409 ft. I was surprised. Really surprised. I started
to doing other comparisons. You can see the results below. Horsham is
the town we lived in in the UK, Jajce is where we are now. The Shard
is the tallest building in London, the Avaz Twist Tower the tallest
in Sarajevo. Leith Hill is the tallest hill in the Horsham area – a
similar distance away as Ranč is to Jajce. Ben Nevis is the highest
point in the UK; Maglić the highest in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Let's
say, I look at our local hill a little differently now.
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