Monday, November 27, 2023

An Ice Stupa?

 Having hiked through the Himalayas I have seen many Stupas. What they are is the remains of High Tibetan Lamas in remote places in a stone or cement decorated edifice.

So, to call these Ice Stupas seems appropriate because they too help life on earth in the physical and in their spirits to go on and live their lives.

I think there are many ideas like the Ice Stupa idea that will become useful during Global Climate changes. I think we all need to be open to thinking up these new and often simple ideas.

I have spent time in the high desert of California above Yucca Valley and the weather conditions are very different in these kinds of places. They would be especially different when you get above 10,000 feet there are often many different micro-climates.

For example, I have had a lot of experience around Mt. Shasta which also has many microclimates. It isn't unusual in the summer to have below freezing weather up high on Mt. Shasta but in the town of Mt. Shasta it might be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I climbed Mt. Shasta in some of these conditions in August of 1970 where it was like this. 

Also, I have been in sunny weather at about 80 to 85 degrees up at about 10,000 feet with my family traveling in a 4 wheel drive truck (before they closed all the roads to thsese altitudes) (the U.S. Forest Service) in the early 1980s and been caught hiking with my older children when they were young in a blizzard in August which was difficult to survive in just T-shirts, shorts and hiking boots for us all until we could slip and slid over rocks and boulders back to the 4 whee drive truck we went up there in. So, unusual weather conditions of all kinds exist at higher desert like altitudes in multiple microclimates at altitude around the world.

For example, in a valley at 9000 or 10,000 feet because we were closer to the equator than in the U.S. I have come across bananas growing wild even at that altitude in the Himalayas some places. I have also come across fireflies in Nepal in the Himalayas too in march of 1986 when trekking through the Langtang Region of Nepal nearer to Kathmandu and the Tibetan Border then as well.

In Fact, I had never seen American Fireflies at that time in my life because I had never traveled to the East Coast of the U.S. yet only to Chicago was as far east as I had been in 1986. Later I went with my wife to Virginia and saw fireflies again with my youngest daughter when she was I believe 3 years old.

So, many unusual places with unusual weather conditions exist around the world at altitudes above 5000 to 10,000 feet all over the world. And so it's very important to be prepared for some of these conditions or else you won't survive at altitude. So, it's important to always be prepared for everything from shorts and a T-Shirt to clothing appropriate to below freezing including hats, gloves jackets pants and boots and various other things you might need to survive anything you encounter.

So, though the ice stupa is a simple invention of pipes coming from a higher altitude to create a fountain which creates at those temperatures an ice stupa which doesn't melt as easy as something else might because of how the sun hits it only on one side (which is an amazing way to store water in the form of ice later into the year for farming.

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