An elevated discussion

In my departure post before our trip to Colorado, I mentioned that San Antonio's elevation above sea level was 300 feet. I could have sworn I'd heard that somewhere. However, Henry, attending to his husbandly duty of correcting my mistakes whenever possible, said he thought it was 700 or 800 feet instead.

This got me thinking about who was right. And, being a government information librarian by trade, I knew where to go for the answer: Elevations and Distances in the U.S., a good example of your tax dollars at work. One of the website's sections gives the elevations of the "50 largest cities," of which San Antonio is definitely one. And the elevation answer? I was wrong, astonishingly, and he was more-or-less correct: our elevation varies from 500-1000 feet above sea level. Still practically awash in oxygen compared to our Colorado destinations, but higher than I thought.

Fooling around with the elevation information, though, led me to remember other elevation-related arguments discussions we have had. The first major one concerned the concept of timberline. Just looking at these two pictures, which peaks would you say are at the highest elevation?

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The first picture was taken in Glacier National Park when I was a little girl and I remember very vividly the incredibly rugged peaks there. [You can see more of this '50's-era scenery in my collection of old photos.] So I argued for Montana's mountains having higher elevations than the gentler-looking summits we'd become familiar with in Colorado (the second picture).

Bzzzttxxx! I was wrong again. Colorado's mountains are LOTS higher than the highest peaks in Glacier. I don't have a positive ID on the mountain in my picture above, but the highest it could have been (going by my perusal of our Glacier topo map) is Going-to-the-Sun Mountain at just over 9600'. The highest peak in the park, according to the park website, is Mt. Cleveland at 10,466'. [And, referring again to the Elevations document linked above, I learned that Montana has a grand total of zero 14er's. Not that its scenery is in the least diminished by this lack.] A bit shorter than Mt. Shavano in the Colorado picture above, which weighs in at 14,229'. [And as readers of this blog might remember, Chaffee County, home of Shavano, has more 14-er's than any other Colorado county. So it's not a fluke.]

What threw me off is the treeline. More exposed rock makes a mountain look higher, but the peaks in Glacier have their latitude to thank for this, not their altitude. A friend later gave me a formula that I've since forgotten and can't find on the internet (!) that gives the relationship between latitude and treeline, but I did find [curiously, in several sources like answers.com, this precise example—I wonder where they all got it?]:

"timberline is at about 2,500 ft (750 m) on Mt. McKinley, Alaska; 6,500 ft (1,950 m) on Mt. Shasta, Calif.; and 11,500 ft (3,450 m) in the San Francisco Mts., Ariz."

Anyone who wants to figure out my missing formula from these figures is welcome to do so.

Of course, the vantage-point elevation of the viewer can also impact how high a mountain looks. Which leads to another elevation-related discussion we had once, about the mountains in Hawaii, long before we actually made it there for a visit. Given how small the islands are, how could they possibly have mountains almost as high as the ones we visit in Colorado? That would mean an elevation gain from 0 to almost 14,000' over a very short distance. Well, a quick check in our atlas confirmed that this amazing fact is true. Mauna Kea, on the Big Island, Hawaii's highest peak, according to the USGS, has an elevation of 13,796' ! [California, however, has even this elevation gain beat: its low point is Death Valley, which is below sea level and its highest is Mt. Whitney at 14,494'. However, it covers a lot more real estate than Hawaii.]

Here is a picture we took of the White Mountain in the distance during one of our Hawaii hikes (the white dots on top are the telescopes). Remember how far south it is, which accounts for the high treeline. Otherwise, it looks pretty tall:


One more fun elevation fact. Everyone knows that Denver is the Mile-High-City, right? When they built Coors Field, home field for the Rockies, my second-favorite baseball team [the one that's actually had a good year] they came up with a clever way to highlight this. "While most of the seats in Coors Field are dark green, the seats in the 20th row of the upper deck are purple. This marks the city's one mile elevation point." [from Wikipedia's Coors Field article] Clever decorating, eh?

GO ROX! Hang on to that Wild Card* lead!

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*Although I object in principle to the baseball playoff system. But that's a discussion topic for a future post.