Category: Central Sierra

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Central Sierra Tahoe Sierra Nature Tahoe Sightseeing

#293: MOUNT SHASTA: A WORLD APART

In June 2023 Nora and I visited spectacular Mount Shasta near the southern edge of the Cascade Range in northern California. Shasta is a monster of a compound stratovolcano formed over ~600,000 years by extruded lava and pyroclastic flows issuing from deep vents. The double-peaked, conical-shaped massif towers more than 10,000 feet above the Shasta-Trinity National Forest that surrounds it, with a summit elevation of 14,163 feet. The mountain’s upper slopes support five glaciers, including Whitney Glacier, the largest in California.

Mt. Shasta appears to be comprised of two volcanic cones, but there are four. Satellite cone Shastina (12,330 feet) – to the left in this photo – is about 10,000 years old, having developed after the most recent ice age. It last erupted 200 years ago. Geologically dormant, Mt. Shasta remains a potentially active volcano that last erupted in 1,250 AD per the Smithsonian Institute’s Global Volcanism Program, but this sleeping giant is currently quiescent. The USGS states that eruptions occur about every 600 to 800 years and future volcanic eruptions are inevitable. USGS rates its threat potential as “very high” and although we may not see this bad boy blow, humans in the future undoubtedly will.  

Weather on the mountain can be severe any time of year. It’s a rock with perpetual snow. Legendary California environmentalist John Muir was an intelligent person, but the man had a penchant for putting himself in harms way while he indulged in the wrath of Mother Nature. On April 30, 1875, during an ascent to the summit of Mt. Shasta a violent storm struck, pummeling him and his companion with hail, snow and wind, and only by luck and the grace of God did they survive for him to write the tale.

Spanish colonizers never made it this far north with their hated mission system, forced conversions and slavery, but the Americans did, and they proved more destructive to Native culture. Mt. Shasta has strong cultural and spiritual significance for regional Indians. Artifacts suggest Native Americans have resided in the area for ~9,000 years. The five tribes that live within view of the volcano revere it and have incorporated the mountain into their creation myths and timeless teaching stories.
Like every other California Indian tribe, arrival of Euro-Americans in the mid-19th century led to conflict and death for the First Peoples of the Klamath region. Unknown diseases introduced by Anglos, destruction of waterways due to gold mining and timber harvesting killed off vital salmon stocks, and eviction from traditional homelands nearly eliminated Indigenous inhabitants. Of the thousands of Indians that lived there pre-contact, by 1910 only about 100 remained. Sadly, First Nations not recognized by the U.S. government are called “ghost tribes.” Today surviving descendants work toward restored federal recognition and preservation of their customs and culture.
Today, spiritual tourism by non-Native visitors is big business as seekers from around the world pursue their quest for connection with “angels, aliens and mystical energy” allegedly associated with the imposing mountain. But if Indigenous people recognized the power of Shasta, perhaps there is some tangible otherworldliness after all. Lenticular clouds that frequently form over the isolated, uplifted terrain in spring and fall create impressive UFO-like apparitions, which back in the day were mistakenly associated with alien spacecraft. Some refer to Shasta as the new Roswell, New Mexico, where UFO conspiracy theories abound.
Mt. Shasta generates an imposing presence for residents and visitors for miles around it.
At 6,950 feet, Bunny Flat is the main trailhead and route to the summit of Mt. Shasta and where the scenic Everett Memorial Highway is closed for winter. A popular launching point for cross-country skiers and snowshoers, summer attracts hikers, campers and high-altitude wildlife enthusiasts.
Mount Shasta City makes for a good basecamp for those who prefer a motel to tent or RV camping. The cozy town offers a mellow vibe — unlike Tahoe — and decent restaurants. A short jaunt in the community park near Big Springs Meadow leads you to Spring Creek and the humble headwaters of the Sacramento and Shasta rivers.
Snowmelt from the flanks of Mt. Shasta spawns the headwaters of the Shasta River, the McCloud River and the mighty Sacramento River, lynchpin of the Central Valley Project that provides flood protection, hydroelectric power, agricultural irrigation and municipal water supplies to vast swaths of the Golden State. Age-dating at the spring indicates that this water fell at the 8,000-foot level of Mt. Shasta more than 50 years ago. Signs warn against drinking untested water, but Nora and I witnessed a local filling large containers for consumption. Can’t stop true believers.  
Nearby Castle Creek State Park showcases polished granite domes and dramatic spires more than 170 million years old, the current formations etched and carved by Pleistocene glaciation of the past 12,000 years.
Visitors at the Shasta Dam. During winter storms towering Mt. Shasta snatches snow and rain from moisture-rich clouds and slowly dispenses the water during spring and summer snowmelt. A classic hydrological cycle. Much of it feeds Shasta Lake. Note the die off in the forest.
View of The Three Shastas. Shasta Dam and its reservoir known as Shasta Lake are huge. It was a massive federal project of hydrological superlatives, but like all dams, came with tremendous negative ecological impact. After the wet winter of 2023 water levels have rebounded.
Phuket is the largest island in Thailand and a top tourist destination, but the name makes me chuckle. Apparently, I’m still a juvenile.
What’s in store…for 2024?  Damn! Where’s my Nevada map?

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Central Sierra Climate Change Tahoe Snowstorms Tahoe Weather Weather History

#292: Winter 2023: Facts, not Hyperbole

Now that the snow has settled from the monster winter of 2023, it’s time that we dismiss the sensational headlines and understand that it was not the record season for snow and water in the Tahoe Sierra that the media would have you believe. References to “record snow/precipitation” continue even though data indicate otherwise.

That’s not to say it wasn’t an epic season in California. Officially, 2023 ranks 5th for snowfall at Central Sierra Snow Laboratory near Donner Pass (since 1880), and 5th for snow and 3rd for cold at Tahoe City where weather bureau measurements began in 1909, the longest dataset in the Tahoe Basin.  

NOAA does not use snowfall data from ski areas in its official tallies, but in the Sierra high country incessant atmospheric rivers coupled with consistent below normal temperatures in 2023 translated into seemingly endless powder dumps.

A few California ski resorts set new maximum snowfall records for their locations, including Palisades Tahoe (Squaw Valley) with 723 inches at 8,000 feet elevation. Mammoth Mountain in the southern Sierra blew past its old record with 885 inches (74 feet). Mammoth is still open with top to bottom skiing so get out there if you still need more runs in your quiver.

In the Great Basin, at least 8 Utah resorts set new maximum snowfall totals. Alta Ski Area set a record with 903 inches (75 feet) by the time it closed at the end of April 2023. The region is famous for its light fluffy snow, but for those who got a taste of the bottomless “cold smoke powder” this winter will be bragging about for years to come. Utah hydrologists tallied 30 inches of snow water equivalent (SWE) in the snowpack statewide, also a record.   

In April 2023 I created a Power Point presentation for a client that briefly analyzes last winter’s impact in the Tahoe Sierra and its historical ranking for snow and precipitation. (Precipitation is the combination of rain and water equivalent of snow.) I extracted about 10 slides to illustrate this Tahoe Nugget.

 

The Northern Sierra is the most important region in California for water storage captured from runoff draining the normally wet watershed north of Highway 50 to Mount Shasta. The Northern Sierra 8-Station Index was established in 1922 to provide hydrologists with vital, real-time data regarding precipitation values throughout this vast region. Note that the precipitation value for 2023 is well shy of the top water years.

Tahoe City’s 316 inches (26.3 ft.) of snowfall in 2023 was good enough for 5th place, but needs another 220 inches ((18.3 ft.) to overtake the 1st place winter of 1952! Check out the July 1952 snowpack below.

I’ve used this slide for years. General Mariano Vallejo was an important Californio and ally of the United States in the Mexican American War (1846-48). Despite the fact that the Americans arrested and confined him to prison for no good reason. Vallejo is not talking about climate change in the modern sense, he’s commending the Americans for their industry and can-do spirit.

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Central Sierra

NUGGET #291: EASTERN SIERRA GRANDEUR

The Owens Valley along the Eastern Sierra Front is a magical place with world-class views. Bounded by the White-Inyo Mountains to the east and the Sierra Nevada on the west, each with peaks exceeding 14,000-feet, it is considered the deepest valley on the American continents with a 10,000-foot difference between summits to valley floor. The crests between the two towering ranges are only 20 miles apart, with the valley between. Like Lake Tahoe, Owens Valley is a graben, a down-dropped block of land between two vertical faults. Geologically active, an 1872 earthquake on the Lone Pine fault uplifted the Sierra 15 to 20 feet in massive thrusts.

Peering down upon Bishop, California, from a vantage point in the White-Inyo Mountains. Native Americans called the valley Payahuunadu, meaning “place of flowing water.” It used to be flush with water until a Los Angeles water and power utility deceitfully acquired nearly all water rights in the area. The movie Chinatown with actor Jack Nicholson touches on this topic.  

View south along Highway 395 heading to Walker Pass where the Sierra Range begins to peter out. In 1834 mountain man Joseph R. Walker first entered the southern end of Owens Valley via a pass he learned about from Native Americans, now called Walker Pass.

The Manzanar War Relocation Center opened in 1942 as one of 10 such encampments established to incarcerate Japanese immigrants ineligible for citizenship and Japanese American citizens during World War II.

The Alabama Hills are a formation of unusual, eroded rocks and hills located west of Lone Pine at the base of the massive Sierra Front. This National Scenic Area was named for the Confederate warship CSS Alabama by prospectors sympathetic to southern resistance in the American Civil War. Hundreds of movies have been filmed at this iconic western location and every Fall the Lone Pine Film History Museum hosts a festival to honor the industry. Legendary Western actors like John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper and many more rode horses in this spectacular terrain.

At 14,494 feet, Mount Whitney is the highest mountain peak in the lower 48 states. Although it towers two miles above Lone Pine, its profile is a bit muted by the proximity of other peaks and granite needles that exceed 14,000 feet.

I’m a big fan of Highway 395 road trips!

Although it’s hard not to smile at this graffiti in the Alabama Hills, I’m sure the Bureau of Land Management discourages the defacement of this remarkable and fragile ecosystem. Traveling companion Nora O’Neill leaves no trace; takes only pictures. Backcountry code.

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Central Sierra Climate Change Weather History

#229 CAMP CENTURY PART 2

CAMP CENTURY: CITY UNDER ICE  (PART 2 OF 2)

Around 1960 a secret United States military installation known as Camp Century was constructed 40 feet below the surface of the Greenland Ice Cap. Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the camp was powered by the Army’s first field nuclear power plant. Camp Century represented a cutting-edge laboratory where scientists conducted experiments such as radio communications; food preservation; special medical and healing problems; over-ice and under-ice transportation; and the development of better fabrics for cold weather protection. They also wanted to grow fruits and vegetables using ultraviolet lights and try hydroponic farming under the ice.

Camp Century was powered by the PM-2A, the U.S. Army’s first portable nuclear power plant.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t the first time humans had tried to survive the severe weather on the Greenland Ice Cap by burrowing below the surface. During the winter of 1930-31, German Astronomer and Meteorologist Alfred Wegener spent the winter there, living and working in a subsurface shelter he cut out of the ice. Unfortunately, it was Wegener’s last Greenland expedition as he died there of heart failure due to the strenuous environment. Camp Century, however, was much more sophisticated than a simple hole in the ground as it housed a complex of barracks and laboratory buildings in four different levels of ice tunnels, and accommodated up to 250 persons. As a multi-purpose lab, the camp supported nearly 100 research projects over a two-year time span.

Among the projects underway at Camp Century was the development of over-snow tranportation vehicles. Large tires provided a measure of safety against falling into crevasses and “float” over loose snow.

Two of the “Ice Worms,” as Camp Century residents were called, were Dr. Robert W. Gerdel, a physicist and engineer who established the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory (CSSL) at Norden, California, in 1946, and B. Lyle Hansen, another brilliant scientist who also conducted research of the Sierra snowpack at the CSSL. As the lead environmental researcher at Camp Century, Dr. Gerdel played an important role in many ambitious projects tested there, including tunnel stabilization technologies, experimental aircraft landings on ice and snow, as well as continuing the snow physics research he had started at the CSSL on Donner Pass.

As lead research scientist at Camp Century, Dr. Robert Gerdel brought expertise and experience he gained from years studying the Sierra snowpack on Donner Pass. Despite being deaf from a botched tonsillectomy operation when he was a boy, Gerdel enjoyed a long and accomplished career as America’s Chief  of the Climatic and Environmental Research Branch for the U.S. Army’s Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research agency. 

Physicist Hansen earned assignments in Greenland that included developing a radiometer system to detect potentially deadly, hidden crevasses in the ice sheet, and engineering the first thermal drill with a hollow, electrically heated head to demonstrate the feasibility of recovering samples from deep within the ice sheet. The yearly layers in the extracted cores can be dated both by counting each layer — much as the age of a tree is determined by counting its growth rings — and by isotope dating of bubbles of ancient air trapped when the ice was formed.

Thermal drill in operation in Camp Century ice tunnel.

The data obtained in these early drilling projects led to the discovery of previous, rapid climate change cycles and represented a huge leap forward in the science of paleoclimatology. The discovery of natural oscillations in greenhouse gases found in the trapped air of polar ice was considered one of the most important advances in the field of climate and earth science at that time.

Scientists B. Lyle Hansen (left) and Chet Langway study an ice core sample extracted from the Greenland Ice Sheet. The CRREL emblem on their jackets stands for Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, a scientific agency based in Hanover, New Hampshire. (A more recent core extraction in Antarctica drilled in 2001 and 2002, chronicled climate there back 800,000 years, which includes our most recent ice age and seven more before that.)

Within a few years of the initial drilling at Camp Century, scientists had bored down from the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet nearly two miles to its bedrock interface, and removed an ice core that represented 110,000 years of climate data. Hidden in the deep layers of ice were samples of the earth’s ancient atmosphere, clues to volcanic and climatic factors that led to past ice ages. Scientists learned that past climates have been wildly variable, with larger, faster changes than anything industrial or agricultural humans have ever faced. Triggers that have caused dramatic climate change include changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis, wobbles in its orbit, surges of great ice sheets, and sudden reversals in ocean circulation, among others.

Engineers at Camp Century filled over-sized tires with fuel so they wouldn’t have to haul drums of it on sleds behind their vehicles as they traveled across the ice sheet.  Once the fuel was consumed, the tires were filled with air.

Anthropogenic global warming is a hot topic these days, and scientists often look to the distant past to see what may lie ahead in the future. Much of what we know about prehistoric climate is due to the hard work conducted by Camp Century Ice Worms like Dr. Robert Gerdel and B. Lyle Hansen, two men who cut their teeth on Sierra snow.

Entrance to Camp Century. One of the reasons that the operation was shut down was because the constant movement of the Greenland Ice Sheet destorted the tunnel system and required personnel to regularly shave ice from the deformed walls and ceilings.

For more info on Dr. Gerdel’s work at the Central Sierra Snow Lab, click here:

http//donnersummithistoricalsociety.org/PDFs/newsletters/news08&09/june09addendum.pdf

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Central Sierra Climate Change Weather History

#228: CAMP CENTURY PART 1


CAMP CENTURY: CITY UNDER ICE (PART 1 OF 2)

Fifty years ago, a secret United States military installation known as Camp Century was constructed 40 feet below the surface of the Greenland Ice Cap, just 800 miles from the North Pole. The remote outpost, buried deep under Arctic ice, was manned by more than 200 American military personnel and civilian scientists.

Camp Century’s subterranean location beneath the ice cap protected the men from some of the harshest weather on the planet. The close-knit group of academics and enlisted men stationed there conducted innovative scientific studies and breakthrough climate research in a labyrinth of rooms and tunnels embedded in advancing glacial ice.

Signs with mileage distance are posted for major cities at the subterranean Camp Century beneath the Greenland Ice Cap.

Planned as a self-sufficient, autonomous community, Camp Century represented a “moon colony” on Earth. Construction on the strategic project began in 1958 and the facility was operational by 1960. An elaborate military experiment, Camp Century was laid out with tunnels, dorms, a hospital, library, movie-theater, and other recreational amenities.

Trenches were cut using a Swiss snow miller which blew pulverized ice up to the surface. The milled snow was shoveled onto sheet metal panels arched over the tunnels where it froze solid as concrete. The water and sewage operation was unique in the world. Storms at the surface could generate wind gusts to 125 mph, with ambient air temperatures at minus 70 degrees. Despite wind chill factors nearing 150 degrees below zero, the personnel stationed at Camp Century went about their business in relative comfort.

This Swiss-made snow miller was designed to clear railroad tracks. At Camp Century, it cut trenches more than 40 feet deep.

The futuristic facility was powered by a portable 1,500 kilowatt nuclear reactor constructed in New York. Weighing 472 tons, this first-of-its-kind prefabricated nuclear plant was broken down into 27 large parts and flown to the Greenland coast. There the packaged components were sledded in 100 miles to Camp Century (thus the name). Using just 100 pounds of atomic fuel, the $6 million nuclear-powered unit displaced the 555,000 gallons of diesel fuel required to run the camp every year. Despite serious issues with excessive radiation and a multitude of problems in the steam generator system, engineers eventually overcame most obstacles.

Once trenches were cut, corrugated sheet metal arches were fit into place and then covered with freshly milled snow. After a matter of hours, the “snowcrete” roof became rock-hard and the panels were removed and used elsewhere.

The origin of Camp Century had its roots in the late 1940s during the American-Russian Cold War, when the U. S. government decided to establish strategic, manned installations in the world’s Polar Regions. The shortest distance between Washington, D.C. and Moscow is across the Arctic Circle, and Greenland was considered a favorable location for an early warning defense system against incoming Soviet missiles.

The men who lived and worked at Camp Century proudly called themselves “Ice Worms.” Two Greenland Ice Worms were former staff members from the Central Sierra Snow Lab (CSSL) near Donner Pass; scientists Dr. Robert Gerdel and B. Lyle Hansen. This “City under Ice” may conjure visions of the villain’s cavernous ice palace in the James Bond thriller “Die another Day,” but Camp Century was the real deal, where the extraction of glacial ice cores to study prehistoric climate change (paleoclimatology) got its start.

Dr. Robert Gerdel stands in the Camp Century tunnel system, circa 1958, where the science of paleoclimatology was greatly advanced.

Based on their expertise in snow science, it’s no surprise that Dr. Gerdel and Hansen both found themselves working at Camp Century. As lead research physicist in hydrology with the U.S. Weather Bureau during the 1940s, Gerdel had established the CSSL at Soda Springs, California, as well as two other national snow labs in Oregon and Montana. B. Lyle Hansen, a brilliant engineer and physicist, arrived at the CSSL in 1950 to replace Gerdel who was being reassigned.

Dr. Gerdel’s early efforts improve our scientific understanding of the complexities of the vital Sierra snowpack laid the groundwork for a water management system that helped nourish and sustain the growth of California into an economic giant. At Camp Century Gerdel and Hansen would meet again to play an integral part in the advancement of paleoclimatology being conducted there.

Camp Century housed a complex of barracks and laboratory buildings in four different levels of ice tunnels, and accomodated up to 250 persons. As a multipurpose lab, the camp supported nearly 100 research projects over a two-year time span. 

Stay tuned for Part Two.

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