Over the parched mountains from where the Granite Mountain Hotshots died a little more than a week ago while battling what became the deadliest wildfire since the 1930s, thousands of firefighters and family members packed an arena on Tuesday for a two-hour memorial to honor their bravery.
That may be because you've never spent a summer panting like a rented donkey in the parched mountains of the Douro Valley.
So it was that Alvaro Palacios set out on his own eccentric path, following a former Palacios Remondo export manager, René Barbier, into the parched, rugged mountains southwest of Barcelona, a place so remote from the wine mainstream it literally had no officially recognized name.
Emulating the hand-drawn style of a preschooler, the ad depicted a young girl flanked on one side by burning mountains, parched earth and an angry-faced sun, and on the other, by a soothing vignette of green fields, blue mountains, solar panels and a wind turbine.
The walls of the lounge at André Balazs's Standard hotel on Sunset in Los Angeles offer a panoramic view of parched Southern California mountains.
As we drove out of the mountain terrain, I once again marveled at the endless miles of moonscape on both sides of the road, distant brownish gray hills and mountains, parched flatland dotted with a few green walnut and citrus groves fed with water stolen from who knows where.
It means parched grasslands, wildfires, snowless mountain peaks and record low stream-flow in the West.
Huge stretches of mountain terrain and parched desert did not lend themselves to successful homesteading, which tidied up the East and Great Plains states in mile after mile of tidy if monotonous surveyor's quadrants.
Pakistan has sealed the main checkpoints at the border, so the way to get in is most often through one of a hundred back doors, over the narrow smuggler trails, around the coiling mountain cliffs, onto the parched floor of the desert.
The pictures grow on you, as Mr. Frondorf wrote in an introduction, "with city streets flowing into farms and prairies, parched deserts flowing into forests and mountains, and thunderstorms rolling into azure skies".
