Skull Mountain

If you go Cedar Point, 1 Cedar Point Drive, Sandusky, Ohio; (419) 627-2350, http://www.cedarpoint.com . Must: Cedar Downs Racing Derby, one of the last racing carousels in the world. Miss: The miserable Mantis stand-up coaster, which left my head aching. Kennywood, 4800 Kennywood Blvd., West Mifflin, Pa.; (412) 461-0500, http://www.kennywood.com . Must: The Sky Rocket is ideal for kids transitioning from junior coasters to metal monsters. Miss: Garfield's Nightmare, a glow-in-the-dark comic strip makeover of the 1901 Old Mill ride that ruins the park's oldest attraction.

Soon after last year's big Landers earthquake, scientists knew that many areas of the West were being shaken much more than normal, and within a week they issued a report that Landers had unexpectedly triggered "sympathetic" quakes as far north as Mt. Shasta. Now, after months of studying reams of data, researchers report that sympathetic quakes were recorded in Yellowstone National Park, 800 miles from the Landers epicenter.

The magnitude 7.9 earthquake that rocked Alaska on Nov. 3 has lent new credence to the theory that large temblors can trigger seismic activity even thousands of miles away. Immediately after the earthquake, the largest to strike on land since the 1906 quake that leveled most of San Francisco, seismic instruments recorded increased activity as far away as California. There, swarms of tiny temblors shook the Geysers, north of San Francisco, and Long Valley, in the eastern Sierra.

This would seem the perfect place for an earthquake. There are no skyscrapers to topple, no bridges to crumble, no dams to crack. In fact, there is no sign of life at all, save for the ghostly contrails of Air Force jets passing high above the desert floor. Still, when a 5.6 temblor rustled the sagebrush here late last month, it caused a major stir across Nevada. The federal government wants to build the nation's first dump for high-level radioactive waste nearby.

Squinting against the enveloping gloom, engineer Jim Niggemyer boards the dusty yellow mining train for its long, slow descent into the depths of America's nuclear solution--through the twisting tunnel that may one day lead to a nuclear-age pharaoh's tomb. Far out in the bleak desert 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, government researchers are busy drilling, heating and analyzing the depths of this ancient mountain for its likely future as the nation's first high-level nuclear graveyard.