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The Super Trees

On a cutover California hillside thick with scrubby redwoods, Scotch broom, and poison oak, Mike Fay missed a step, started to slide, and felt a stiletto jab the top of his left foot. After bushwhacking hundreds of miles in sandals, he was used to such insults to his 52-year-old feet. But this was the mother of all splinters. It bounced off a bone, lodged in a tendon, and refused to come out. Finally his hiking partner, Lindsey Holm, grabbed it with a pair of pliers and after several sharp tugs, yanked it free. “You could hear me yelling from mountaintop to mountaintop,” Fay says. “It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced.” Which is something coming from a man who was once gored 16 times by an elephant. He taped up the wound, shouldered his pack, and as he had for the past three months, kept walking.

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Plugging into the sun

Early on a clear November morning in the Mojave Desert, the sun is barely touching the peaks of the McCullough Range with a cool pink glow. Behind them, a full moon is sinking over the gigawatt glare of Las Vegas. Nevada Solar One is sleeping. But the day’s work is about to begin. It is hard to imagine that a power plant could be so beautiful: 250 acres of gently curved mirrors lined up in long troughs like canals of light. Parked facing the ground overnight, they are starting to awaken—more than 182,000 of them—and follow the sun. “Looks like this will be a 700-degree day,” says one of the operators in the control room. His job is to monitor the rows of para-bolically shaped mirrors as they concentrate sunlight on long steel pipes filled with circulating oil, heating it as high as 750 degrees Fahrenheit. From the mirror field, the blistering liquid pours into giant radiators that extract the heat and boil water into steam. The steam drives a turbine and dynamo, pushing as much as 64megawatts onto the grid—enough to electrify 14,000 households or a few Las Vegas casinos.

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Vanishing Venice

Nowhere in Italy, where calamity comes embellished with rococo gestures and embroidered in exclamation points, is there a crisis more beautifully framed than Venice. Neither land nor water, but shimmering somewhere in between, the city lifts like a mirage from a lagoon at the head of the Adriatic.

For centuries it has threatened to vanish beneath the waves of the acqua alta, relentlessly regular flooding caused by the complicity of rising tides and sinking foundations, but that is the least of its problems...

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Divining Angkor

From the air, the centuries-old temple appears and vanishes like a hallucination. At first it is no more than a number smudge in the forest canopy of northern Cambodia. Beneath us sprawls the lost city of Angkor, now in ruins and populated mostly by peasant rice farmers. Clusters of Khmer homes, perched on spindly stilts to cope with flooding during the summer monsoon, dot the landscape from the Tonle Sap, the “great lake” of Southeast Asia, some 20 miles to the south, to the Kulen Hills, a ridge jutting from the floodplain a roughly equal distance to the north. Then, as Donald Cooney guides the ultra light plane over the treetops, the magnificent temple comes into view.

Restored in the 1940s, the 12th-century Banteay Samre, devoted to the Hindu god Vishnu, recalls the medieval Khmer Empire...

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The Forgotten Faithful Arab Christians

Easter in Jerusalem is not for the faint of heart. The Old City, livid and chaotic in the calmest of times, seems to come completely unhinged in the days leading up to the holiday. Every face on Earth seems to float through the streets during Easter, every possible combination of eye and hair and skin colour, every costume and style of dress. They come because this is where Christianity began. Here in Jerusalem and on lands nearby are the stony hills where Jesus walked and taught and died - and later, where his followers prayed and bled and battled over what his teaching would become...

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Ice Baby

A near –perfect frozen mammoth resurfaces after 40,000 years, bearing clues to a great vanished species. Discovered by reindeer herders and turned over to scientists, the herders had never seen such an animal before. They knew it well from stories their people sang on dark winter nights in their storytelling lodges this was a baby mammoth, the beast that wanders the frozen blackness of the underworld.

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