I'm assuming that anyone venturing here, in the dry and dangerous central Crunch, has some experience flying on Capsica on rented wings. Your shoulders have stopped hurting, you can spot likely updrafts, you're used to low gravity and high air pressure, and of course, as always, extreme heat, making the lowlands fatal. Okay, I've stated the obvious. You've been warned.

Grol Upland's in the hot, dry, central Crunch; Terrans can only reach it in winter. Well, we'll start in late fall on the rim of G'lasa Plateau in the far south, follow Hai Keel north to Grol Plateau, circle its rim widdershins sorry, counter-clockwise, then exit west along the Detto Range to Tiaka Plateau. We should slip into winter as we reach hotter latitudes. Seasons change fast on Capsica--barely nine weeks each--so we'll be in deep winter as we skim the edge of the deadly desert basins on the north side. Sweaty, but not fatal.

In fact, the roughest bit may be hopping from peak to peak along the Detto Range as it warms up early in spring. So I may move you along pretty fast; it's not that the place isn't scenic, it is--it's just bad form for a guide to let tourists die.

We start on the G'lasa Plateau, in the southeast Crunch, climbing over Kra Pass (5200 m, 17,000'), a high saddle between the Kra and Zida Mountains. I hope you're used to high-altitude flight by now--it's work. But the views are worth it. The far side drops kilometers into Grol Basin. Strong, steady updrafts here--like a freeway after dirt roads. Whew! Your shoulders can rest.

Scenic, too. Here the rim of G'lasa is green atop great bared layers of tan and red stone, white-plumed with waterfalls a kilometer high. The gulf below you, 4 km deep (13,000') is a dusty, hazy, rose abyss--Afran Savanna. Hard to tell from here, but on the horizon it thins to full desert. You'd think the Grol Sea would make the coastal strip rainier, but Grol Sea, landlocked and unstable, recedes each summer and in frequent multi-year droughts, baring salt flats. Dust from these keeps the coast barren; what you see looks unfriendly, but it's the Grol Basin's best face.

South all afternoon along the rim; slowly the mountain wall steadily curves southwest. Camp when you can see a strange spire in the abyss, on the northern horizon. It looks like the end of a huge wall, though you're not sure in the sunset glare.

But in the clarity of dawn, you can see. That's the tip of Hai Keel, a gigantic ridge, or drastically simple mountain range if you like, 5-6 km high (16-20,000') running a good 800 km (at least 500 mi) north to Grol Plateau, in the heart of the Crunch. A major flyway, for the prevailing winds slam right into it and generate huge, reliable updrafts.

Hai Keel is probably a plate boundary. Well, platelet. A lot of these jam together in the Crunch. The Rift constantly spreads new crust, but where the Rift curves, these fresh slabs of pavement on the concave side of the arc can't just ride along peacefully--they squeeze, fracture and stack. With low gravity and little erosion (dry basins), great ridges like this aren't rare. They exist on Earth too, but only where shielded from erosion, in the oceanic abyss (for example, see the Ninety East Ridge south of the Bay of Bengal, or Albatross Ridge off Central America--except you can't. Miles of water hide them.)

Bless Capsica's relative dryness, for exposing all this deep-sea crustal drama--just as much scenic verticality as that mad sculptor Ice gave Earth! Drought giveth what Warmth taketh away. One could argue for a geographic principle, call it the Bioscenic Law Of Conservation Of Verticality (BLOCOV): "Only tectonically active worlds will circulate minerals well enough to sustain multicellular life, so all inhabited worlds will be scenic!"

Climate only determines where the scenery is.

North over the fifty-km gap to Hai Keel.

Lazy days--for hundreds of kilometers you just surf the air-wave over the Keel, looking up to craggy green heights and down at rumpled pink veldt and rose groves. Occasional creeks cascade out of the heights--warm but drinkable and swimmable if you get too hot. Easy travel, for the Crunch--as long as you stick to the western, windward face, in the Somi Basin. Downdrafts on the eastern, lee side, the Grol Basin, are treacherous. Well, not for locals, but certainly for you.

The first day or two, slopes drop just a couple of km beneath you, to foothills still a mile up; by day three, the hills subside to a plain flat as a sea--which it was, the primal Somi Sea before it shrank to that sad, salty, shallow shadow (say that fast three times!) hidden beyond the horizon. Colors wash out--the veldt's dry and pale, broken by bare brown rock and golden dunes.

That red streak, pale in the far haze, is the Hai River, where the meager creeks off the Keel collect and eventually wind down to the Somi coast. Small villages dot the riverbanks, but you can't even spot them from here, and you can't go closer. Far too hot down there--cooled neither by the heights of the Keel nor by the sea. The curse of between.

A few days north, the Keel fails you. Not Capsicans, just you. It still generates updrafts you can ride, but the ridge sags below the green line--it still snags enough rain for creeks or at least springs, but ahead nearly all the grass and scattered trees are red; it's too hot for you to camp. The Hai Gap from here to Grol Upland proper is 180 km (110 mi). Luckily a few peaks poke back into the olive zone--one about 50 km out, and another some 25 km from the Upland; we'll camp on the first tonight, and stop for a rest on the second tomorrow...

The Delit Mts, a sinuous front range, rises from the Grol Basin a few hundred km inland from the sea. The coastal strip between is grassier than the Afran Desert behind you, but not much. Stingy land. Ruddy outcrops above the pale pink fuzz of dry grass on the flats.

The mountains aren't so bad. Winds aren't strong here, and though they come off the sea, the Grol's not big; still pretty dry. Still, the front range rises several km, cooling the winds; thunderclouds in summer. But only showers, nothing steady. Sparse rains in winter. Few trees. Green to golden prairies instead of hot pinks, but still mostly grass.

But a few times a day you cross tree-lined creeks that leap off the rim in slender falls. Good spots to camp.

North for several days, along the Delit Range flyway. It's a good 900 km (560 mi) to the northern corner of Grol Plateau. Above you, the Delits thrust rugged peaks, white-tipped for the first couple of days; though they're only 4-5 km high (13-16,000'), too low for snow on most of Capsica, this is a mid-latitude continental winter. The summits in the north are closer to the equator and a hair lower, so the snow vanishes the last day or so; like the northern Alps and Maritime Alps, or the Rockies and Sangre de Cristos. At Mediterranean latitudes, a few hundred miles makes a big difference.

You spot no cities, but it's not completely wild; villages straggle along hanging canyons with reliable streams, usually in the olive or high red zone, not the green (brrr! Remember, Capsicans can't even touch snow; it burns exposed skin.) They may look lonely to you, but they're not. Way stations on a major flyway through the Crunch. Flight makes the difference.

At last the Delits curve west...

Here at the northeast corner of Grol, you could peel off our tour and head north along the R'lpok Range to Tralken Plateau, arguably the heart of the Crunch--near its southwest rim is the spot farthest from the world-sea, some 4000 km north, south, east and west. Not quite a Pole of Inaccessibility--not on a world of fliers!--but the most cut off from shipping--and rain. One impoverishes the people, the other, the land.

Let's not go and say we did. Sorry, I know that theme crops up a lot on Capsica...

West along the S'bir Hills. More than hills, luckily, or you'd be dead. But compared to the Delits, or the Sstoks on the south rim of the plateau, they're low and broken; most peaks are under 3 km high (below 10,000'); valleys between slump into the fatal red zone. Semiarid; at this latitude, and this far inside the Crunch, they just don't snag much rain. You'll find enough to drink, even places to swim in the heat of the day; but you'll have to look.

Grol Plateau isn't even a plateau, exactly, at least not like most of the Crunch's sustained highlands, which are distinct rafts of lighter rock--continental miniplates. Grol's just a collection (most likely a collision) of mountain ranges, an almost-plateau. Not the total failure of Droom Desert to the northwest (just a scattering of ridges dividing three basins) for here the alluvial fans of the three main ranges have merged and built up. But not high enough to be hospitable to Terrans. The southern slopes of the S'bir Hills drop to steppes of mixed green and red grasses (well, pale pink and blonde; mostly dry), much of it no more than 2.5 km high (8,000'), and dissected by deep desert canyons. Very hot even now in winter.

Still--stick to the highest ridges of the S'bir and you'll be fine. I think.

Two days west, you reach the Mount S'bir, by far the highest in the range, at 4.5 km (nearly 15,000'). The first peak since the southern Delits high enough for snow--at least streaks on the shady south face. Rest and cool off. The next stretch will be sweaty.

South along narrow intermittent ridges of dull green, until they break into islands--wooded buttes above dry gold and pink grasslands.

Camp on one on the brink of a big canyon, carved by the Grol River--still miles off, out on the southern horizon.

Up early. Cross the canyon before it gets really hot. It's not that far, for Capsica--an hour to reach and cross the inner gorge; by lunch, a small mesa 50 km out, safe to land on and offering some shade, though no water. You stay til late afternoon, then sail on, billowed by updrafts, to a larger mesa--a finger of our goal, the Sstok Range.

Next day: south to Mt Sstok, the highest peak so far--5.8 km (19,000'). Deep green forests, then chartreuse meadows; snowy heights ahead. More snow-peaks float on the eastern horizon, a hundred miles off: the southern Delits, where you entered Grol weeks ago. Nearly full-circle. Well, triangle.

The Sstok Range isn't a clean line like the Delits or Sbirs. Overlapping lava flows form an irregular sky-island around 500 km long and half as wide (300 by 150 mi). The heights have a fully Terran climate, with heat rarely over 40°C in summer (104°F) and mild to downright cold in winter.

West... how long? Just a day, two? We skirt West Peak, 5.5 km (18,000'). After it, the massif breaks up, though it's a full day more before you see a single red tree.

Once you cross an olive-colored canyon where as many trees are red as green, you've left the Sstok Range and entered riskier and less Terran territory: the Detto Hills.

The Dettos aren't a line or ridge, but a scattered net of ridges and volcanic platforms. Some desert-hopping required. But the distances over the red zone are never too long.

A full day west to Mt Detto itself, a volcanic massif tens of miles across, and high enough at 5.2 km (over 17,000') to have open forest, green meadows, and at this time of year, a little snow on the heights.

North of the main line... up to the isolated Ivapaa Massif, another confused volcanic mass, only (only!) 4.8 km high (nearly 16,000') but big as a county. Rising close to the sea, it snags a bit more rain than most in the region; green woods and meadows. Snowfree, even now in winter. A bit lower, a bit closer to the equator...

Ride the sea-winds up to the broad summit. It's not blunt, as it looks, but a true caldera, a deep one, with cliffs a kilometer tall, cupping a deep blue eye: Lake Ivapaa. No outlet. It's still freshwater--a rain cistern the size of Manhattan.

As long as you're this high up, the highest you'll go on this tour, you might as well look around. You're as close as you can get to the Tanip Sea; it's still just a gleam 100 miles off to the north--and that's not water shining, but sun-glare off the coastal saltflats of Involbe Desert.

That green line floating on the western horizon is Ngira Corona, an oval caldera-like feature 150 km wide (close to 100 mi), with a ring of ridges and sawed-off peaks two miles high; remnants, I suppose, of a catastrophic collapse of a massive volcano long ago. Let's not go see. It's a long hot flight, without the steady updrafts of a ridge beneath you. Hot and sticky.

Instead let's take the easy way--head south and a bit west along an olive-wooded ridge to the main line of the Dettos again. Hot if you must land and rest, but tolerable. Late in the day you reach the main line of the Dettos again. Those taller ridges lie right across the winds off the Tanip Sea, muscling them upward. That line of swelling, almost-thunderhead cumulus says (to your now-experienced eye) updrafts offering a free ride.

Next day you skim effortlessly west to Atniu Massif, another mass of overlapping lava flows built so high it's forested; the last of this sort in the Dettos.

Two days west along straight, narrow ridges marking strike-slip faults with some compression, where the Tanip and Somi platelets squeeze and grind. Plenty high enough to be cool along the ridgetops, but the survivable zone's so narrow that water may be a problem--springs are down the ridge in the deep olive zone, dangerously hot. Brief, sparing water raids, and back to the ridgetop, a narrow spine of green trees. A sky-road two miles above the pink savanna, golden dunes and white dusty salt flats below. East, Middle and West Ridge crawl slowly by beneath you...

The Tanip Sea lies around 30° south, a terrible latitude for a continental interior. Air heated at the equator descends here, wrung of all its moisture. Narrow little Tanip, a mini-Mediterranean, does its best to remedy that, but it's regrettably like Earth's Persian Gulf. Because it stretches thousands of km, not hundreds, it partly succeeds; all that heat and evaporation does recharge the air enough for rains on these highlands, and even, sparsely, on the foothills--the spiderweb of creeks below the escarpment are lined in red trees. But this is its best face; overall, Tanip Basin rivals Eltek (to its northeast) as Capsica's barrenest.

At the Dettos' feet on the north side lie shallow brackish lakes. Three of them creep past us over as many days--imaginatively called East, Mid and West Detto Lakes. Why lakes in a desert? These basins are cut off from the sea by lesser sky-islands to the north, crowned in sparse red and olive woods; cut off, they swell and ebb seasonally. No stable shorelines, floods that salt rather than fertilize the soil. The basins aren't barren, but are sparsely settled; you don't spot a single village down there. Drainage matters.

Ahead rises a mountain wall. A big wall. A really big wall. The rim of an upland twice the size and quatruple the biomass of scruffy little Grol. You've escaped completed this tour. Onward to Tiaka Plateau!

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