A Flight Around the World's Highest Mountains: Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa

Mountains that make their own weather can be frustrating because...they make their own weather. High mountains in the path of consistent winds force air masses upwards, causing the water vapor within to condense, forming clouds and as often as not, rain. This is especially true around the tallest mountains on the planet.

I'm not talking about Mt. Everest in the Himalayas. It's tall of course, just over 29,000 feet above sea level. But if one measures from the base of the mountain on the sea floor, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawai'i are around 32,000 feet high (Mauna Kea edges out Mauna Loa by about 120 feet). The two giants are nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, and they rise in the middle of the northeast Trade Winds of the Pacific Ocean. They are often clear for a few minutes in the early morning, but the clouds can build quickly, obscuring the view. During our field studies trip in 2016, we had been exploring for five days before the students even saw Mauna Loa at all.

I've been privileged to visit the Hawaiian Islands eight times now, and that means there've been a few chances to see the great shield volcanoes from above as I've arrived or departed from the islands, but none of them was like the scene that presented itself to me this morning. We had an early flight, and for once I was on the correct side of the plane (for the record, on flights out of Hilo you want to be on the left side of the plane). There were just a few clouds on the northeast side, but we flew through them and soon the entire north flank of Mauna Kea was spread out below.

These mountains are astoundingly big. They formed from hundreds of thousands of eruptions of non-viscous (easily flowing) streams of basaltic lava generated at a "hot spot" in the earth's mantle hundreds of miles beneath the surface. The outer lithosphere of the earth slides over the hot spot, carrying earlier-formed volcanoes to the northwest. Kauai, Maui, and Oahu were all once large shield volcanoes like Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, but they have subsided and erosion has ripped into their flanks. Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa will eventually suffer the same fate, and in fact Mauna Kea hasn't erupted in several thousand years (a number of very expensive telescope dot its summit). Mauna Loa is still highly active, having erupted in 1984. I wouldn't be shocked if it erupted again tomorrow (which would be the karma of just having left the island).

Perhaps my favorite shot of all, the north flank of Mauna Kea

These mountains aren't just fascinating as geological entities. They are also biological refuges. There are hundreds if not thousands of rare and endemic species of plants and animals in the forests on the flanks of the mountains. There are few environments like these on the planet, a slope that climbs from beaches to tropical rainforests, temperate rainforests, high deserts, and alpine slopes. One can see from the patchwork of cleared forests on the flanks of the volcanoes that we have severely affected these unique environments in order to raise cattle and goats. Many species, especially birds, have been lost, and other are barely hanging on.

Three gigantic shields in one picture, Mauna Kea on the left, Mauna Loa in the center, and Hualapai on the right.

It was a fascinating flight around the summits of the world's highest mountains!

The Other California: The Biggest Living Things and the Deepest Canyon in the U.S. (maybe, almost, perhaps)

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks were established 50 years apart (1890 and 1940), and they preserve different aspects of the Sierra Nevada, but they are adjacent and as such are jointly administered by the Park Service. My Other California blog series is an attempt to spotlight the lesser known parts of our state that don't always show up on the postcards that tourists buy, but which have incredible geological features. As a pair of national parks, Sequoia and Kings Canyon don't seem to fit the bill, but I include them because the two parks are less visited, and yet have some of the most spectacular geological scenery to be seen anywhere. How many places can boast the highest peaks, the deepest canyons and the biggest living things in the world?

A bit of perspective on my claims, though. Sequoia National Park includes the highest peak in the lower 48 states, with Mt. Whitney (14,505 feet; 4,421 meters). Denali in Alaska is much higher, and Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii are the tallest mountains in the world (if you measure from the seafloor). Kings Canyon has a reasonably valid claim to being the deepest canyon in North America, but the deepest part of the canyon lies a few miles downstream of the park boundary (though it is partly protected as Giant Sequoia National Monument). But the biggest living things? Absolutely.

There has always been a bit of confusion about the Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron gigantea), because California has two gigantic tree species. The other is the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), which grows in a narrow coastal corridor between Big Sur and the Oregon state line. The Coast Redwood grows to immense heights (nearly 400 feet), but is usually slimmer. The tallest Sequoia trees usually don't exceed 300 feet (the tallest is 311 feet), but the trunk is more robust to a high level, so the shorter trees have the greater bulk, making them the largest living thing on the planet. The state legislature was confused certainly, as they made the "native redwood" into the state tree without realizing the two trees were distinct. The attorney general of the state eventually got involved, making a final ruling declaring both species to be the state tree. Both tree species live for thousands of years, but neither is the oldest living thing in existence. That honor goes to the 5,000 year old Bristlecone Pine, also a California resident species.

The trees are tremendous. They occur in about 60 groves between about 4,600 and 7,000 feet along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Such giant trees would seem irresistible to loggers, and many were cut, but the wood was actually of low quality for most purposes and was usually made into pencils, shingles or grapevine stakes. Today nearly all the groves are protected in the national parks (Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon), a national monument (Giant Sequoia), and a state park (Calaveras Big Trees).

The trees have a geological story. They once thrived across the northern hemisphere, and in North America fossils of the trees are preserved in Yellowstone and Petrified Forest National Parks (the direct ancestors are preserved in Nevada). The petrified trees in Yellowstone are several tens of millions of years old, but the trees in Petrified Forest are several hundred million years old! Ancestors to the Sequoia date at least to the Jurassic Period, so the trees were witness to the evolution of the dinosaurs and their extinction. Climate change seems to have been the tree's nemesis, and the Pleistocene ice ages probably eliminated them from most of their former range. The trees were able to survive in the Sierra Nevada in part because they could propagate downslope and upslope in response to the advancing and receding glaciers (see this National Park Service article for the details on the origin and distribution of the Sequoia trees).

I'm opening a can of worms by discussing the deepest canyon in North America. Hells Canyon on the Snake River along the Idaho-Oregon border is usually described as the deepest, but measurements vary, as well as the precise definition of canyon. I won't make a judgement other than to say that the two canyons are very close to being the deepest, only a few tens of feet apart, and that both of them are 2,000-3,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon (The Grand really is grand, though. According to the park service, with a volume of 4.17 trillion cubic meters, it is the largest canyon in the world). Spanish Peak, at just over 10,000 feet (in the photo below), looms 8,000 feet over the canyon bottom at Rough Creek.

How can this canyon be so deep? If you saw my last post, you would recall that the southern Sierra Nevada is topographically different than the northern Sierra. It is more a high plateau than a westward tilting block. The adjacent Central Valley is different as well. It's been sinking, so much so that some of the sedimentary fill has buried portions of the Sierra foothills. Strange things are happening in the southern Sierra, and it may be related to a process called delamination. The Sierra may have had a dense root of mantle material that was out of equilibrium with the surrounding hotter and slightly fluid mantle. The large mass broke away and sank deeper into the mantle. The overlying crustal rock, the Sierra, popped upwards like a ship losing an anchor. The Kings River, with an increased gradient, started cutting rapidly downwards within the last few million years. Spanish Mountain can be thought of a high secondary ridge like the Great Western Divide, but it was breached by the erosion of the Kings River.

What's ironic? The river that carved the deepest (or second deepest) canyon in North America doesn't flow into the sea. The Kings River historically flowed mostly into a large lake in the southern Central Valley (Tulare Lake) and evaporated away. Some distributary channels delivered water to the San Joaquin River (and then onto the Pacific Ocean), but today the river is fully utilized for irrigation, and even the lake is gone, replaced by agricultural fields.

When we visited a few weeks ago, the road into Kings Canyon was still closed. The problem isn't snow (there wasn't any to speak of). The canyon slopes are so steep and rocky that rockfalls are a continuing hazard when the ground is still saturated and subject to freezing conditions. We had to take a pass this time around, but we'll be back in the fall for a field studies class. Look for pictures around early October!

Oh, and there were some cute dogs hanging out at Grant Grove....