YGGDRASIL ?
Imagine a hill or mountain of any size, with rills, gullies or canyons running together from all sides toward the top. Now visualize a gargantuan tree growing from it, made of thermal lift. Its roots originate low in surrounding draws and grow together where the heads of tributaries meet. When two or more roots join they push each other UP, accumulating kinetic mass times velocity squared, and flowing toward a large central current (the tree’s trunk) above the summit. From there, lofting into even cooler air, the whole bundle continues to expand and accelerate. In this way, one weak thermal scarcely wide enough to circle in down low may swell into a rampant, miles-wide brute high aloft.
Say you begin among tight foothills nearly encompassed by rocks or trees, with one sure route to safety. It’s either climb or retreat. At first you may need to turn tight and reverse directions like a barn swallow until your thermal merges with one from a neighboring ravine. Then you feel enveloping energy swell with each clawing step up the hill like the growth of a newborn flying tiger. Grab its tail and hang on!
This same sequence of redoubling continues at ever greater scale until the biggest, strongest lift has been collected above the highest peak for miles around. If mountains are steep with narrow crests like we have here at Crystal, booming lift from opposite sides of the great watershed will collide overhead in huge volumes. Above there, lift may quickly weaken, or continue yet another vertical mile depending on the temperature spread (potential for overdevelopment is a function of humidity). Inspiring to be a part of.
The divine reality of such soaring potential should have some kind of special name, and since no one was here to stop me I coined one. Okay, two. YGGDRASIL is most appropriate, but it’s hard to say and almost nobody knows what it means. (Scrabble players, look it up!) So lest a listener think you’ve got something stuck in your throat, here’s another, tastier name for the ultimate over-the-top treat in any soaring playground: BIG CANDY !
The opposite occurs later, as high ground cools and these diurnal processes reverse. Cold air from aloft flows down-slope, flushing away from hills into low areas, our magical tree melting into the ground. Winds are always named for where they flow from, so these are known as ‘mountain’ winds. They’re essentially all sink — until they flow against some obstacle, solid or atmospheric, and who knows, maybe head back up again…