Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “High and mighty”
A gentle direction — no specifics.
Closer — the category is coming into focus.
Near-direct — only read if you’re stuck.
Direction only.
Getting closer.
Near-direct.
7 theme words — lengths in random order
Spaces not counted in total
All theme words — shuffled
These words fit the theme on the surface, but aren’t part of today’s solution. Knowing them ahead of time can save you minutes of searching.
An incline is exactly the sort of terrain word this puzzle seems to be fishing for, so it reads as a safe guess.
Rock feels unavoidable in any rugged, outdoor word set, which is precisely why solvers reach for it early.
It's the natural counterweight to anything lofty, so it looks like it belongs — the grid simply doesn't go there.
An adjective that sounds tailor-made for an elevated puzzle, but adjectives rarely turn out to be the answers here.
a textbook decoy
At 5.3, this one lands in the middle because the clue "High and mighty" reads as attitude rather than scenery, and it takes a beat to notice the grid wants the landscape interpretation. CLIFF and SNOW are the early handholds; once those two surface, the set reframes itself as terrain vocabulary and PEAK, RIDGE and SUMMIT follow almost automatically. SADDLE is the real unlock, though — it's the word that proves the puzzle is doing geology instead of postcard scenery, and GLACIER becomes findable right after. The spangram was easier than expected, since MOUNTAINTOP is a long, transparent compound that sprawls across the board and tends to expose its own path once a shorter word or two is placed. What makes the group trickier than it looks is that PEAK and SUMMIT are near-twins, so early finds narrow the field less than they seem to.
"High and mighty" is a classic double-edged clue. On the surface it's the old idiom for someone haughty and full of themselves — all attitude, no altitude. But Strands loves a literal reading, and here "high" points straight at elevation while "mighty" points at the sheer scale of the thing you're standing on. Once you spot MOUNTAINTOP, the phrase stops being about arrogance and becomes a description of the terrain itself: CLIFF, GLACIER, RIDGE, SUMMIT. The pun was doing double duty the whole time.
The editor's angle here is anatomical rather than cartographic: not a single named mountain, range or country appears. Instead the puzzle assembles the generic parts list of high ground — CLIFF, GLACIER, PEAK, RIDGE, SADDLE, SNOW, SUMMIT — so the theme works anywhere on earth and nowhere in particular. Including SADDLE alongside GLACIER is the clever move, because it drags the set away from postcard scenery and toward real geomorphology. MOUNTAINTOP then caps it as the container for all of them.
