As visitors enter, an audiotape recording promises them high mountains, scorching deserts, great cities, vast valleys, a mountaintop monastery, and the world's only toothpick farm.
Since it is unlikely that early settlers would clear vast areas on mountaintops far from home or drive their herds into the middle of dense forests, one might assume that the fact that these grasslands already existed was a major consideration in their eventual exploitation.
But I doubt Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan has ever looked out on the vast wasteland of a mountaintop removal site and pronounced it good.
The modern, 25,000-square-foot Glaciarium, which stands alone on a vast stretch of land overlooking the mountaintops of Los Glaciares National Park, was designed to resemble a series of ice blocks.
"This is so normal!" Oprah Winfrey exclaimed as Tom Cruise took her through the vast, pristine, wood-paneled kitchen in his mountaintop estate in Telluride, Colo.
Having lost the Peloponnesian War, Athens built a vast network of forts and watchtowers, situated on mountaintops, six to eight miles apart.
A federal appeals panel has dismissed a lower court's finding that the strip mining of West Virginia mountaintops violates environmental law by allowing vast amounts of coal slag to block hundreds of miles of vital streams.
This sprawling metropolitan area of about 12 million is its own vast, urban land of adventure that stretches from seaside to skyscraper to mountaintop, while passing through almost every ethnic hinterland on these shores, from Little Tokyo to Koreatown, from Mexico to Persia, Israel and, of course, China.
THE northern boreal forest once stretched unbroken from Maine to Minnesota, a vast, mossy sea of trees, punctuated only by archipelagoes of rocky mountaintops and thin ribbons of water.
In announcing the guidelines, Lisa P. Jackson, the agency's administrator, cited evolving science on the effects of mountaintop removal mining, an aggressive form of coal extraction that uses explosives and vast machinery to tear off hilltops to expose coal seams, dumping the resulting rubble into streams and valleys below.
