Dragon Mount

[1qq]

How tall is it?

[Agitel]

All I know is that the air is to thin to breathe at the top.

[1qq]

that could be anywhere from 10,000 to 20-25000 feet

[fikkie77]

How tall is it?

We only know it's miles high.

[dovien]

It was a landmark, that mountain - one jagged fang sticking up out of rolling flatlands - easily seen for many miles, easy to avoid, as all did, even those who went to Tar Valon.

 

North and west the wind blew beneath early morning sun, over endless miles of rolling grass and farscattered

thickets, across the swift-flowing River Luan, past the broken-topped fang of Dragonmount, mountain

of legend towering above the slow swells of the rolling plain, looming so high that clouds wreathed it less than

halfway to the smoking peak.

 

The land tended upward from the River Erinin, not in hills but simply rising toward the

monstrous peak that loomed to the west, so massive it seemed to mock the name mountain.

Dragonmount would have towered above everything else even in the Spine of the World; in the

relatively flat country around Tar Valon, its whitecapped crest seemed to reach the heavens, especially

when a thin thread of smoke was streaming away from the jagged top as it was now. A thin thread at that

height would be something else entirely, close at hand. Trees gave out less than halfway up

Dragonmount, and no one had ever succeeded in reaching the crest or even coming close, though it was

said the slopes were littered with the bones of those who had tried. Why anyone would try in the first

place, no one could quite explain. Sometimes the long evening shadow of the mountain stretched all the

way to the city.

 

We may have enough information to work it out. Anyone care to figure out how far exactly Dragonmount is from Tar Valon?

[Agitel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_line

 

Scroll down and you get a chart listing the variations in tree lines. Could be anywhere from 5,000 to over 11,000 feet, depending on climate. Probably not on the lower end, as Tar Valon isn't near the ocean or in an extremely dry region or anything. What is the area around Tar Valon... plains? Heavily wooded? I always imagined planes or something, but I could easily be wrong.

 

Tar Valon could be considered as being int he Ukraine or western Russia, I believe, in relation to today's world, though without any major seas nearby...

[dovien]

I think it's mostly farmland and plains with regular scatterings of forest. I can check if it matters.

What I was really thinking was of some clever trigonometry.

[moratcorlm]

Here's one:

The countryside was pocketed with thickets of scrub oak; shadows in valleys and twisting lines of chimney smoke pointed to distant villages. It was surprising how familiar, how welcome, these grasslands felt.

There are probably others; we spend a lot of time around Tar Valon. New Spring would probably be a good place to look; also TDR, during VENEM's return. The rebel siege is mostly during winter.

[Jblaylock]

Well, thin air is one thing, but fatal altitude, known as the Death Zone, begins at 26,000 ft. I don't remember the exact wording in TGS, but when Rand was up there it seemed like -- were it not for the OP -- he would not have lived long. That leads me to believe that DM is at least 26,000 ft high.

 

Now, take that, plus the fact that the World of the Wheel tends to draw obviously obvious comparrisons to our world, and excuses it as a slight variation of the same thing during a new spinning of the wheel (Artur Hawkwing = King Arthur, The Green Man = Treebeard [or countless other Ents], Drakghar (spelling?) = Vampires, etc etc) I'd say that Dragonmoutn is that spinning's version of Everest, which would make it 29,000 ft.

[Luckers]

I have a memory of Brandon saying it was four miles high, but can't access the interview database to check for sure.

[Jon Paul]

depending on climate.

 

Climate wont mean much for Dragonmount will it? It's not a natural mountain.

[fikkie77]

depending on climate.

 

Climate wont mean much for Dragonmount will it? It's not a natural mountain.

The mountain wasn't created naturally, but that's also true for almost all mountainranges in Randland.

But it's still made of the normal resources a regular mountain or volcano (I believe Dragonmount is an active volcano) is made of. That means that plants and trees can grow on it, just like they do on other mountains, up to the same height normal mountains have their tree border.

[mb]

Encyclopaedia tells 10 miles tall.

http://encyclopaedia-wot.org/geography/dragonmount.html

[Agitel]

Encyclopaedia tells 10 miles tall.

http://encyclopaedia-wot.org/geography/dragonmount.html

 

That's like double the height of Everest. I say NO to that.

[dovien]

Ten miles does seem mockingly over-large.

[moratcorlm]

I don't know of any evidence supporting that. The Encyclopedia is almost unfailingly well-cited, but there are a handful of cases where it puts forward theories as facts, some of them not terribly well-supported, and I guess this is one of them. Ten miles is nearly Olympus Mons territory.

[Thorum]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_line

 

Scroll down and you get a chart listing the variations in tree lines. Could be anywhere from 5,000 to over 11,000 feet, depending on climate. Probably not on the lower end, as Tar Valon isn't near the ocean or in an extremely dry region or anything. What is the area around Tar Valon... plains? Heavily wooded? I always imagined planes or something, but I could easily be wrong.

 

Tar Valon could be considered as being int he Ukraine or western Russia, I believe, in relation to today's world, though without any major seas nearby...

 

 

One area comes to mind as having a comparable geography & climate: the southern Ural.

 

When you look at the first few Google-topics, the tree-line there is probably around 1500 m. Which gives at least 3 km height for DM (10 000 feet). When you compare to stand-alone mountains irl: that's almost twice the Mont Ventoux; or half the Kilimanjaro.

 

 

Next, the clouds. Low clouds are found around 6 500 feet (source: Wikipedia). Which gives a similar height when doubled.

 

The other clues are less straight-forward.