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.