Tag: French

 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.

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 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 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.

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.

 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.

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 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.

 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 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.