Big Mountain

At first, it didn't look good for Big Mountain. The Theater of Living Arts crowd Friday night didn't quite reach triple digits. The "drum circle" that preceded the reggae band's appearance was high on passion, OK on grooves, but low on technique. And the multiracial California band's own percussionist substituted the traditional Afro-Jamaican akete, or repeater, drum for a pair of tiny U.S.-made congas. Of course, that's only a minor infraction. But all this seemed to indicate that Big Mountain would live down to its reputation as a group known only for playing confectionery Reggae Lite.

Filled with breathtaking shots of crazed nutballs on skis plummeting down pitched peaks at high speed, Steep is a visually exhilarating sports documentary that is also more than a little exasperating. These guys (all but one of the "extreme skiers" featured in Mark Obenhaus' film are men) talk about what they're doing - getting to the trickiest, remotest patches of the Alps, the Rockies or wherever and then zooming groundward - as though there is nothing more meaningful, more profound, more enlightening, for a human being to do. As hugely skilled and fearless as these skiers are, they're huge with self-importance and hyperbole, too. But those are the interviews.

A plan by a coal company for a strip-mining operation on an Arizona Indian reservation will mean the "total annihilation" of the Navajo Nation, a tribe spokesman said here yesterday. Larry Anderson, a full-blooded Navajo, told a crowd of about 200 at the Friends Center that more than 400 Navajo families, or about 16,000 people, must relocate by July 7 under a federal law that gives the Peabody Coal Co. the right to strip-mine 65,000 acres of Indian land at Big Mountain. Anderson said the land is sacred to both the Navajo and Hopi tribes that live there.

While many of us plan to celebrate Independence Day, our federal government plans to take away the independence of thousands of native Americans. The plan is one of the most atrocious perpetrated against native Americans in the past 100 years. The Hopi and Navaho have lived peacefully as neighbors in the Four Corners area of Arizona for hundreds of years. Considered useless, the land was granted to them as a reservation by the federal government more than 100 years ago. More recently, they have been said to be in dispute over a certain parcel of land that they hold in common.

The dirt started to arrive in the fall of 2000, not long after we moved into our new house in East Camden. Our neighborhood is quiet and clean, and our neighbors are nice. I would say our neighborhood is middle-class. There are a few boarded-up houses, but most of the houses are in pretty good shape. My neighbors and I keep up our houses nicely. In our house it's me; my wife, Yvonne; my middle daughter; her two children; and my youngest son. We have a single house with three bedrooms and a two-car garage.

The expansion Houston Texans will begin the long process of building a franchise Monday when they hold workouts for invited players for the first time. Ironically, the sessions will be held inside the aging Astrodome, which the Houston Oilers fled after the 1995 season. The Oilers now are the Tennessee Titans. The Texans will have 10 to 12 defensive backs go through drills. They plan to hold future workouts by position as they move closer to their first NFL season in 2002.

Linda Griffith was stunned when she opened the envelope of photographs submitted recently for exhibition at her Giving Gallery in Huntingdon Valley. "They were a chilling reflection of a Native American prophecy," she said. Taken by J.R. Lancaster, the black-and-white photos ? which depicted a statue of a weeping angel, a Southwestern landscape, pictographs on a rock, and a crumpled pile of white napkins - seemed to have as their theme the ongoing hardships of the Hopi and Navajo, or Dineh, nations of American Indians in Arizona, Griffith said.

I'm on one of the country's original numbered highways from the 1920s. Signs and many addresses along U.S. 322 call it the 28th Division Highway, in honor of the 28th Infantry, the oldest division in the U.S. armed forces. Today, the unit's in service as part of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. At the western edge of Chester County, I first notice an unusual number of trash trucks on the highway, then the sign for the Lanchester Sanitary Landfill and a smaller attached sign that reads: Scenic Overlook.

The searing sun of a midsummer's late afternoon was beating down on our heads and fueling a cloudless, azure sky as its rays glistened off the 14,410-foot volcanic peak of the Pacific Northwest's tallest mountain. Our vista of Mount Rainier was stunning - but the thrill of looking up was what we had expected. What we didn't expect on this balmy day in the Cascade Mountains was the thrill of looking down. It was the stuff beneath our hiking boots, a gentle slope of deep, densely packed snow that my two young children and I gleefully packed into ice balls as we frolicked and slip-slided away, while an occasional sledder whizzed past.

Filled with breathtaking shots of crazed nutballs on skis plummeting down pitched peaks at high speed, Steep is a visually exhilarating sports documentary that is also more than a little exasperating. These guys (all but one of the "extreme skiers" featured in Mark Obenhaus' film are men) talk about what they're doing - getting to the trickiest, remotest patches of the Alps, the Rockies or wherever and then zooming groundward - as though there is nothing more meaningful, more profound, more enlightening, for a human being to do. As hugely skilled and fearless as these skiers are, they're huge with self-importance and hyperbole, too. But those are the interviews.

I'm on one of the country's original numbered highways from the 1920s. Signs and many addresses along U.S. 322 call it the 28th Division Highway, in honor of the 28th Infantry, the oldest division in the U.S. armed forces. Today, the unit's in service as part of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. At the western edge of Chester County, I first notice an unusual number of trash trucks on the highway, then the sign for the Lanchester Sanitary Landfill and a smaller attached sign that reads: Scenic Overlook.

The dirt started to arrive in the fall of 2000, not long after we moved into our new house in East Camden. Our neighborhood is quiet and clean, and our neighbors are nice. I would say our neighborhood is middle-class. There are a few boarded-up houses, but most of the houses are in pretty good shape. My neighbors and I keep up our houses nicely. In our house it's me; my wife, Yvonne; my middle daughter; her two children; and my youngest son. We have a single house with three bedrooms and a two-car garage.

The expansion Houston Texans will begin the long process of building a franchise Monday when they hold workouts for invited players for the first time. Ironically, the sessions will be held inside the aging Astrodome, which the Houston Oilers fled after the 1995 season. The Oilers now are the Tennessee Titans. The Texans will have 10 to 12 defensive backs go through drills. They plan to hold future workouts by position as they move closer to their first NFL season in 2002.

Linda Griffith was stunned when she opened the envelope of photographs submitted recently for exhibition at her Giving Gallery in Huntingdon Valley. "They were a chilling reflection of a Native American prophecy," she said. Taken by J.R. Lancaster, the black-and-white photos ? which depicted a statue of a weeping angel, a Southwestern landscape, pictographs on a rock, and a crumpled pile of white napkins - seemed to have as their theme the ongoing hardships of the Hopi and Navajo, or Dineh, nations of American Indians in Arizona, Griffith said.

The searing sun of a midsummer's late afternoon was beating down on our heads and fueling a cloudless, azure sky as its rays glistened off the 14,410-foot volcanic peak of the Pacific Northwest's tallest mountain. Our vista of Mount Rainier was stunning - but the thrill of looking up was what we had expected. What we didn't expect on this balmy day in the Cascade Mountains was the thrill of looking down. It was the stuff beneath our hiking boots, a gentle slope of deep, densely packed snow that my two young children and I gleefully packed into ice balls as we frolicked and slip-slided away, while an occasional sledder whizzed past.

At first, it didn't look good for Big Mountain. The Theater of Living Arts crowd Friday night didn't quite reach triple digits. The "drum circle" that preceded the reggae band's appearance was high on passion, OK on grooves, but low on technique. And the multiracial California band's own percussionist substituted the traditional Afro-Jamaican akete, or repeater, drum for a pair of tiny U.S.-made congas. Of course, that's only a minor infraction. But all this seemed to indicate that Big Mountain would live down to its reputation as a group known only for playing confectionery Reggae Lite.

The pickle jars were the things I most remembered about this central Vermont village. They lined the shelves beside the basement cot where I slept on my previous visit here, 26 years ago. As for Okemo Mountain, which rises to this town's immediate west, I remembered most a wild ski trail, criss-crossed by a mountain road that, when snow-covered, formed a series of three spectacular, natural jumps. And there were assorted other images that I expected to unfold as we approached Okemo on a quick ski trip last year.

Coloradans hate to admit it, but Vail has always done things in a Texas- size way. It's a big mountain that attracts big shots with big money and big egos. It's been that way since Vail was a pup in the Colorado ski industry, and the resort has never been shy about using its bigness as a major marketing point. Today, Vail - that so-called "instant Tyrolia" squeezed into a long, narrow valley in the Rockies - is the country's largest single-mountain ski resort, with 92 creatively cut trails and enough diversions to keep battalions of rooster-tailing schussers happy for weeks.