Escape From the City
On any given weekend, thousands of Americans flock to the mountains to escape the rigors of city life. An escape from their bustling, smog coated, deadline driven lives, is a necessary part of 21st century life in an American city. Mans desire to commune with nature can be traced back to the earliest civilizations, and while that desire may have lessened somewhat in the past couple hundred years, the enjoyment of nature still remains. In Colorado, a mixture of big city life surrounded by wondrous miracles of nature can be found. Thus, every Friday in summer time one can observe long lines of vehicles traveling the vast highways leading out of the city and up into the Rocky Mountains.
An often sought destination is Rocky Mountain National Park. The U.S. government originally purchased the 358 square miles that compose the park in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1915 it was officially declared a national park, and later became an enormously popular tourist attraction for the nearby town Estes Park. Today this national park is comprised of some 150 lakes, 450 miles of river, and over 265,000 acres of land. Nearly three million people visit the park annually.
Surrounded by massive purple and blue peaks, the tallest which rises over 14,000 feet, one is truly awestruck at the power and beauty of Mother Nature. The winding roads which encircle these mountains mark mans ascent and discovery of the surrounding lands, but also provide the opportunity to reach higher into the heavens then most dreamed possible a mere century ago. The breathtaking view over the surrounding lands, which was once only available to the adventurous mountain climber, is now readily available for all to see.
One of the most popular of these roads is aptly named Trail Ridge Road. Construction began on this mountain pass in 1929 and was completed three years later in 1932. Workers were only able to work on the road four months out of the year due to the harsh mountain weather, and even today with all of mans wondrous technology, Mother Nature still reigns supreme allowing the road to be open only a handful of months. In mid April of each year, plowing beings to remove the snow covering the icy landscape allowing people to labor up the sometimes 7% sloping highway.
By noon they had begun to climb toward the gap in the mountains. Riding up through the lavender or soapweed, under the Animas peaks. The shadow of an eagle that had set forth from the line of riders below and they looked up to mark it where it rode in that brittle blue and faultless void. In the evening they came out to upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north... The crumpled butcher paper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium. (168)
Rocky Mountains, nearly one-third of the land in Montana is publicly owned and administered by the federal or state government. The vast tracts of undeveloped land include most of the Rocky Mountains, which attract tourist who ski, hike, and climb the peaks (Av2
With MS, most people experience exacerbations, where symptoms get progressively worse, which are then “followed by periods of reduced or no symptoms,” indicative of remission (PubMed Health 2013). Though for many it is “common for the disease to return (relapse), […for some] the disease may continue to get worse without periods of remission” (PubMed Health 2013). Also, the severity of the disorder can be amplified by exposure to extreme heat in addit...
At the end of Being and Nothingness,Jean-Paul Sartre concedes that he has not overcome one of the key objections to existentialism viz., an outline of ethics, and states that he will do so later. Although Sartre attempted the project of an existential ethics, it was never quite completed. Enter Simone De Beauvoir. In this book, De Beauvoir picks up where Sartre has left us, refusing to answer the question of ethics. For De Beauvoir, human nature involves and ontological ambiguity whose finitude is bound in a duality. This duality of body and consciousness is the ambiguity which remakes nature the way we want it to be as a facticity of transcendence. It is within this understanding that the project of ethics must begin in ambiguity. However,
Colorado was viewed as a place to visit and live in because of the climate, scenery, and promise of good health to its people (Abbott, Leonard, Noel, 2013, pp. 227). Tourism in Colorado has evolved immensely and has helped form Colorado into what it is today. Before anyone could realize Colorado’s potential as being an iconic tourist place, in the 1860s, journalist began to view Colorado differently. They began to notice Colorado’s scenery and they slowly recognized Colorado’s potential for evolution and development through tourists and travelers (Abbott, Leonard, Noel, 2013, pp. 223). Many people sought good health while they were sick and since the journalists really started to see the value of Colorado, they really made its climate stand out and become more appealing to those who were sick, mentioning the great benefits the climate would have on poor health. One-third of the state’s population consisted of people that were once sick (Abbott, Leonard, Noel, 2013, pp.229).
Every year, over nine million hikers and adventure seekers travel to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park making it the most visited national park in the United States. There are abundant reasons for this, but many popular reasons include over 150 hiking trails extending over 850 miles, a large portion of the Appalachian Trail, sightseeing, fishing, horseback riding, and bicycling. The park houses roughly ten thousand species of plants and animals with an estimated 90,000 undocumented species likely possible to be present. It is clear why there was a pressing interest in making all this land into a national park. My research was started by asking the question; how did the transformation of tourism due to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park affect surrounding cities such as Gatlinburg and Sevier County, and in return, its effect on the popularity of the park?
It is also estimated that approximately two and half million people are living with the disease... The name multiple sclerosis refers to the scars that are present in the brain and spinal cord is seen on an MRI. An autoimmune disorder is where a person’s immune system mistakes its own white blood cells as invaders and begins to attack itself damaging healthy body tissue. In these types of disorders, the immune system cannot tell the difference between healthy cells and antigens, which are foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses. Because of the damage, it does to the nerve cells; nerve signals can either slow down or stop completely. Inflammation, or the body’s reaction to infection, is what causes this nerve damage to happen. Multiple sclerosis is most commonly seen in the brain, optic nerve, and spinal cord and often leads to physical and cognitive
The drive to cross the Kentucky border had taken hours and hours of strenuous patience to finally arrive in another state. The view was by far country like as hints of cow manure could be smelled far from a distance. We drive through small towns, half the size of our hometown of Glen Ellyn had been the biggest town we've seen if not smaller. The scenery had overwhelmed us, as lumps of Earth from a great distance turned to perfectly molded hills, but as we got closer and closer to our destination the hills no longer were hills anymore, instead the hills had transformed to massive mountains of various sizes. These mountains surrounded our every view as if we had sunken into a great big deep hole of green pastures. Our path of direction was seen, as the trails of our road that had followed for numerous hours ended up winding up the mountainous mountains in a corkscrew dizzy-like matter.
Marlow, in the novel "The Heart of Darkness," experiences an epiphany, or a dramatic moment in which a character intuitively grasps the essential nature or meaning of some situation.
The mid 1800’s was a time of continued physical exploration of the landscape of America, and an era of opportunity for an intimate inspection of the land; areas sometimes found by the traveler with the assistance of Travel Journals and maps. These detailed records, reflected a destination, and also allowed an intellectual travel of the mind. In Margaret Fuller’s, “Summer on the Lake,” and Henry David Thoreau, “Cape Cod,” we experience both their physical, and internal travels, and how each author relates, both physically and mentally, to the natural landscape; the similarities, the differences, and what elucidated each, to seek their journeys. The observed, physical differences of the natural landscapes will be compared, followed by a deeper encounter with Thoreau, as to why, and to whom, his more desolate and dark descriptions of the natural landscape, reached a distinctive, psychological appeal, and how these two views relate to contemporary America.
Man goes through life, waking each day and participating in his own existence without truly existing. He is always in search of a greater meaning, and in the process fails to find one as he is on a constant search for something that cannot be grasped by the normality that is the human psyche. A similar example can be found in the capitalistic work force of modern day. Man works the majority of his life, always training and aiming for more, only to retire and live on a portion of what he was making. During his time working he lost out on his family, his sleep, often times his own enjoyment, for an ideal that often times is never achieved. This is a trivial situation, yet it is painted in a rather angelic light in our society. Why is it, then, that Sartre can be dismissed as trivial when trivialities exist in nearly every day to day life? Quite likely, this is because Existentialism is an “on-paper theory” so to speak, and in theory is looks quite differently than in reality. Man, as in this case, does not realise that he often follows the rules which he opposes. In addition, much of today’s society exists under a form of organized religion, a society with which Existentialism exists in
He basically calls the people of Argos fools for following Zeus and repenting their sins. Here he is removing the people of free will, making them blindly follow this religion. I do think free will is often restricted, but by the person themselves, because they feel like they need to conform and follow this power. Sartre, through Orestes, makes it seem like you can only be free when you are free from power over you, therefore free from religion. I think this is a skewed view of life. Sartre generalizes followers of religion, specifically Catholicism, so much that they all seem like mindless clones. I am not religious, but I think people who follow religion don’t give it all the power. Rather than letting it have a hold over them, they work with it to make their decisions. Here is where I think Sartre fails. He is hypocritical. Sartre makes it seem like searching for answers or validation through religion is foolish, so instead, he gives us the answers he thinks are correct, he gives himself the power over the reader. He essentially makes himself into a god and existentialism into a religion, completely counteracting his previous points. Sartre is telling the reader that they are stupid, and existentialism is the right way, but since according to existentialism there is no right way, it all just becomes a never-ending, pointless
Thus, the idea of ‘God’, a being whose existence entails purpose, seems absurd to Sartre. The one being that satisfies the first principle of existentialism is man: “Man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself” (22). This simply implies that a human being is thrown into this world without any essence, meaning, or characteristics. For example, if someone is to be deemed truthful, he or she is truthful not because he or she told the truth once or twice, but he or she is defined as truthful because he or she habitually tells the truth and lives in such a way that is deemed to be truthful. Hence, this person has been created to be truthful as he has defined his essence by living as a truthful individual. This idea also links back to the concept of abandonment; humans have no intrinsic nature and is left alone in this world to define his or her own nature and
Sartre based his philosophy first and foremost on mankind's innate free will, and declared that it is a by-product of the interaction between being and nothing. According to Sartre, individuals are free from the moment of their birth and they continue on throughout life to define their essence. The nature of an individual is what we have done in the past and wha...
One of the most enjoyable things in life are road trips, particularly to the Colorado mountains. Getting to spend time with your family and friends, while being in a beautiful place, is irreplaceable. The fifteen-hour road trip may feel never-ending, but gazing at the mountains from afar makes life’s problems seem a little smaller and causes worries to become a thing of the past. Coming in contact with nature, untouched, is a surreal experience. My family trip to the Colorado mountains last summer was inspiring.