Tag: French

A sharp, needle-like rock pinnacle, typically of granite, found in alpine environments. The aiguilles of Chamonix are the most famous — spires so narrow they seem sculpted rather than eroded.

 A mass of snow, ice, and debris sliding rapidly down a mountainside. The word is clinical but the thing itself is not — an avalanche can move at 200 miles per hour and bury everything in its path in minutes.

A temporary, minimal shelter or camp, often unplanned — a night spent on a ledge, in a snow cave, under a boulder, or simply wrapped in a bivy sack on open ground. The bivouac is where the mountain decides how you sleep.

The leaves, twigs, and shoots of woody plants eaten by herbivores — deer, elk, moose, goats. Distinguished from "graze," which refers to eating grasses and ground-level plants. A browse line — the sharp horizontal boundary on trees and shrubs where everything below a certain height has been eaten — is one of the most visible signs of deer overpopulation in a forest.

A steep-sided, flat-topped hill smaller and narrower than a mesa — an isolated remnant of resistant rock standing alone in an eroded landscape. A butte is a mesa that has lost most of its surface area to erosion, its cliffs steeper than its top is wide. Monument Valley's iconic silhouettes are buttes. The word implies solitude — a butte stands alone.

A prominent projection of rock from the face of a mountain or cliff — a rib, a pillar, a flying wall of stone standing proud of the main face. Buttresses are some of the most sought-after climbing objectives: they catch light, shed water, and offer continuous lines of ascent that feel like climbing the mountain's spine. The word comes from architecture, but the mountain's buttresses came first.

To cut a broadleaf tree close to the ground and let it regrow from the stool in multiple straight stems. The oldest form of woodland management — a coppiced hazel stool can live for centuries, perhaps indefinitely, regrowing every twelve to sixteen years. The cut wood was the fuel, fencing, and building material of preindustrial life. Also the woodland itself managed this way: a coppice.

 An open crack in the surface of a glacier, formed when the ice moves over uneven terrain or flows at different speeds in different places, and the brittle upper layer fractures under the stress. Crevasses can be 150 feet deep, 60 feet wide, and hidden beneath a thin snow bridge that looks solid until you step on it. They are the constant, invisible danger of glacier travel.

A long, continuous cliff or steep slope separating two relatively level surfaces — one high, one low. Escarpments form where resistant rock overlies weaker rock and erosion has retreated the face, or along fault lines where one side has been lifted. The Niagara Escarpment, the Caprock Escarpment of the Texas Panhandle, the Great Escarpment of southern Africa. An escarpment is the edge of a world — the place where one landscape drops away and another begins.

A long, flat, open stretch of ground — originally a level area outside a fortification, now more commonly a paved walkway along a waterfront or the flat bench between a river bluff and the river below. In geology, an esplanade is a broad, flat terrace or shelf, especially one cut by wave action along a coast.

The damage done to young trees by a male deer rubbing its antlers against the bark and branches, stripping and shredding them. The older, more specific hunting term for what modern trackers call a rub — from the medieval tradition that catalogued dozens of such marks.

Fossil charcoal — a black carbon residue of incomplete combustion preserved in sedimentary rock. Fire's oldest signature in the geologic record, appearing in the early Devonian when the first forests burned. Fusain is the proof that fire is as old as terrestrial life — wherever plants grew, they eventually burned.

A rock tower or pinnacle on a mountain ridge that blocks progress along the crest, forcing climbers to detour around or over it. Gendarmes guard the ridge the way policemen guard a street — you don't pass without dealing with them.

A narrow, deep, steep-walled valley — more precipitous than a canyon, with walls close enough that you can sometimes feel both sides from the bottom. Gorges are carved by rivers cutting through resistant rock, and the narrowness is the point: the water had the power to cut down but not the time to widen.

 A sunken fence or wall set in a ditch, invisible from the house side, that prevents livestock from approaching a manor or garden while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond. The ha-ha creates the illusion that the lawn flows seamlessly into the parkland — no barrier visible, just a sudden, hidden drop. The name supposedly comes from the exclamation of surprise upon discovering the ditch.

The topmost layer of the forest floor — freshly fallen leaves, needles, twigs, bark, cones, and flower parts that are still recognizable as the parts of individual plants. Litter is the raw material; duff is what it becomes after decomposition has made it unrecognizable. Walk through a deciduous forest in November and you are walking on litter. Return in May and it has become duff.

A compact, distinct section of a mountain range — a block of mountains that form a unified mass, often with a single identity. The Mont Blanc massif. The Denali massif. A massif is not a single peak but a cluster of peaks, ridges, and glaciers that read as one mountain body.

The optical illusion produced by light refracting through layers of air at different temperatures, bending the image of the sky down onto the ground so that the desert appears to hold water. A mirage is not a hallucination — it is real light, really bending. The physics is clean. Only the conclusion is wrong.

 A cold, dry, powerful wind that blows from the northwest down the Rhône valley to the Mediterranean coast of France, mainly in winter and spring. It can sustain speeds of 60 miles per hour for days, dropping temperatures below freezing, stripping moisture from the soil, and sculpting the landscape — the windblown cypresses of Provence are shaped by the mistral.

 A ridge or mound of rock, gravel, and debris deposited by a glacier — the rubble it carried, pushed, and left behind. Terminal moraines mark the farthest advance of the ice. Lateral moraines line the valley walls. Medial moraines form where two glaciers merge, their lateral moraines combining into a dark stripe running down the center of the combined flow. Moraines are the glacier's autobiography, written in stone.

 A vertical shaft or tube in a glacier through which meltwater pours from the surface to the base. Moulins form when surface streams find a crevasse and begin to bore downward, the falling water enlarging the hole through thermal and mechanical erosion. The sound of water falling into a moulin is audible from a distance — a deep, roaring pour.

A gap in a hedge or fence habitually used by a hare, worn by repeated passage. Close kin to smeuse, but specific to hares and older by several centuries.

 The accumulation zone of a glacier where snowfall exceeds melt, and where firn is actively compacting into ice. Also used loosely as a synonym for firn itself.

The right to turn pigs into a forest in autumn to feed on beechmast and acorns — a way of sweeping the forest floor of early green acorns that would poison cattle or deer. The rights of pannage still exist in the New Forest. The word names both the practice and the legal right to practice it.

The gently sloping region at the base of a mountain range — the transition between the steep mountains and the flat plain, built of sediment washed down from above. The Piedmont of the eastern United States, between the Appalachians and the Coastal Plain, is the type example: rolling hills on ancient, weathered rock, some of the oldest terrain on the continent.

A tree or stem partially cut through near the base and bent over to form part of a laid hedge, kept alive by a hinge of bark and sapwood through which the sap still flows. The pleacher must always slope upward — the river of sap will only flow uphill. The tensile strength of a plashed hedge is the sum of the imparted energy of the hedger.

 The act of carrying a boat and gear overland between two navigable bodies of water, or around an obstacle in a river — a waterfall, a dam, an impassable rapid. Also the trail used for this carrying. Portage routes were the original highways of the North American interior, and many modern roads follow them.

A long, cross-country hike or ski tour — the French approach to mountain travel, emphasizing distance, terrain, and self-sufficiency rather than technical difficulty. In skiing, randonnée means touring on skins, climbing the mountain before descending it.

A course that crosses every meridian at the same angle — a line of constant compass bearing. On a globe it spirals toward the pole; on a Mercator map it appears as a straight line, which is exactly why Mercator invented his projection. A rhumb line is not the shortest distance between two points (that's a great circle), but it's the easiest to steer.

A standing wave that oscillates back and forth in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water — a lake, a bay, a harbor, a swimming pool — set in motion by earthquake shaking, wind, or atmospheric pressure changes. The water sloshes from one end to the other and back again, sometimes for hours. Seiches can be triggered by distant earthquakes: the 1964 Alaska earthquake caused seiches in lakes and harbors across the continental United States, thousands of miles from the epicenter.

 A tower or pinnacle of ice, formed where a glacier fractures into chaotic blocks as it flows over a steep drop — an icefall. Seracs are unstable, beautiful, and lethal. They can be the size of houses, standing at improbable angles, and they collapse without warning. Climbing through a serac field is a calculated gamble with time.

The thick curve of soil turned over by a plough — the furrow slice. In ground with a high clay content, the sillion can appear to shine. Hopkins used it in "The Windhover": the plod of the ploughman making the earth gleam.

The complete set of environmental factors — soil, climate, topography, hydrology, microorganisms, and human tradition — that give a food or drink product its distinctive character. The word originated in winemaking, where it names the idea that a wine expresses the place where its grapes were grown — not just the weather or the grape variety but the specific patch of earth, its mineral composition, its drainage, its exposure, its microbial community. Terroir has since expanded beyond wine to describe the place-specificity of cheese, chocolate, coffee, honey, and any food that carries the signature of its origin.

 A cold, dry wind that blows from the north or northwest across southern France and into the western Mediterranean — similar to the mistral but originating over the Pyrenees or the Massif Central rather than the Alps. In Italian, tramontana means both the north wind and the North Star.

The seasonal movement of grazing animals — and the people who tend them — between lowland winter pastures and highland summer pastures. Not nomadism; transhumance is a fixed annual circuit between two known places, the rhythm of the year written into the movement of flocks.

 A thin, transparent glaze of ice over rock. Extremely hazardous — crampons can't penetrate it and rock shoes can't grip it. The rock looks bare until you touch it and your hand slides.