There is no pronounced sexual dimorphism in the species, however males may be slightly larger than females in general. In general, the average mass for an adult is 35 to 45 kg with a total range of 25 to 75 kg across the species. This extremely long tail is used specifically for balance in the steep and rocky terrain they inhabit, but can also be used to cover their extremities during harsh winter weather. Measuring from nose to tail, the length of an average adult snow leopard is 1000 to 1300 mm, with a tail length of 800 to 1000 mm equaling roughly 75% to 90% of total body length. Snow leopards generally avoid dense forest cover and cultivated fields, but are associated with open coniferous forest, as well as arid and semi-arid shrubland, grassland, alpine meadows and barren habitats. In the winter they may migrate to lower elevations of 900 meters, following their preferred prey. Snow leopards live in alpine and subalpine zones from elevations of 900 to 5,500 meters or higher, but generally at altitudes between 3,000 and 4,500 meters. Cliffs and major ridgelines are preferred for daytime resting. Steep, rocky and broken terrain are the preferred bedding areas for snow leopards, specifically on or nearby to a landform edge close to natural vegetation. Snow leopards are found anywhere from the Himalayas to southern and western Mongolia and South Russia, however 60% of the range occurs in China, particularly in the Xinjiang and Tibet autonomous regions, as well as in the Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces. This includes the entire Himalayan mountain system, as well as areas in Bhutan, Nepal and the Siberian region of Russia. Some dual awards for hardcover and paperback books were conferred from 1980 to 1983, when both Fiction and Nonfiction were also subdivided in other ways.Snow leopards inhabit a large geographic range of approximately 2.3 million square kilometers and are widely but sporadically distributed throughout the high mountain ranges of Central Asia. The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road. It has been included in several lists of best travel books including World Hum's ten most celebrated books, Washington Post Book World's Travel Books That Will Take You Far, and National Geographic Traveler's Around the World in 80+ Books. It has garnered more critical acclaim since then. The Snow Leopard won the 1979 National Book Award in the category Contemporary Thought Īnd the 1980 National Book Award for Nonfiction (paperback). Questions of absence and presence play in tandem with the wider question of gaining peace through an acceptance of how the world is rather than desiring phenomena to arise that do not exist. The memories of Deborah operate with a number of other recursive stylistic traits that play against the linear, outward progress of the journey logged through maps and dates. The book is, therefore, also a meditation upon death, suffering, loss, memory and healing. Matthiessen frequently digresses to remember his wife Deborah Love who had died of cancer prior to the adventure. For example, towards the end of the book Matthiessen sits on some rocks and observes "These hard rocks instruct my bones in what my brain could never grasp in the Heart Sutra, that 'form is emptiness and emptiness is form'- the Void, the emptiness of blue-black space, contained in everything." It also involves a meditation upon inner peace, however, as well as external exploration, in a way that is reminiscent of Basho, Wordsworth or Thoreau. The nature writing aspect brings echoes of the work of Alexander von Humboldt or Charles Darwin. The travel aspect of the work is in the tradition of writing by Sir Richard Burton, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, and Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. A third part of the plan was to visit the Crystal Monastery and its Buddhist lama. Another aim was to spot the snow leopard, a predator on the bharal and a creature that was seldom seen (it had been glimpsed only twice by Westerners in the previous twenty five years). Schaller's original objective was to compare the mating habits of the Himalayan blue sheep (the bharal) with those of the common sheep of the USA, while for Matthiessen the trip was more of a spiritual exploration. The book recounts the journey of Matthiessen and Schaller in 1973 to Shey Gompa in the inner Dolpo region of Nepal. It is an account of his two-month search for the snow leopard with naturalist George Schaller in the Dolpo region on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalaya. The Snow Leopard is a 1978 book by Peter Matthiessen.
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