Things I Learned This Summer (2007)
by David Pleacher
The highest cliff in Colorado is "The Painted Wall" in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.
It is 2,300 feet tall.
If you placed the Empire State Building on the canyon floor, it would only reach a little more than halfway up.
Every day, tobacco kills 1,200 people.
Carlsbad Caverns contains 94 known caves.
Big Bend National Park has over 450 species of birds, the most of any other national park.
The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and 1 mile deep.
Great Sand Dunes National Park has the tallest dunes in North America, over 750 feet.
Death Valley is the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere at -282 feet.
Cuba is only 98 statute miles (or 85 nautical miles) from Key West, Florida.
The highest point in Key West, Florida is 18 feet!
The Transcontinental Railroad was completed on May 10, 1869 after crossing 1,776 miles.
The Central Pacific (from the West and starting from Sacramento) laid 690 miles of track and
the Union Pacific (from the East and staring from Omaha) laid 1,086 miles of track.
On the Transcontinental Railroad, they laid 2,500 ties per mile. One gang could lay two pairs of
30-foot, 560 pound rails a minute. Spikers drove 10 spikes per rail, three blows per spike.
Virginia has the highest percentage of vanity license plates in the country
(16% of the plates issued by Virginia).
New Hampshire is second with 14%, followed by Illinois with 13.4%.
Texas has the fewest with only 1/2% of the drivers personalizing their plates.
Researchers who looked at the bestselling songs in several genres from 2005 found that 37 percent of top
country songs featured references to drugs or alcohol, compared with just 14 percent of rock songs.
But country couldn't hold a candle to rap music, whose singers referred to substance use in a
whopping 77 percent of songs.
There are 660 restaurants in the Loveland/Fort Collins, Colorado area, and at the end of 2006, they rang up nearly $507 million in sales - about $1,840 for every person in the region.