[pct-l] Mt. Whitney and the white mountains

[kbrandt at cats.ucsc.edu (Karl Brandt)]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Judson Brown wrote:

> Slightly based in truth. Even now, with technology such as it is, I have
> heard there are geologists/geographers who assert that White Mtn. Peak is
> actually higher than Whitney. Since it seems a pretty simple matter of 5th
> grade subtraction to figure this out, I'm sure there is a lot more to it.
> Anybody out there know the story. (since this involves Whitney, perhaps it's
> not totally off topic??)

The hard part is coming up with an accurate measurement of a mountain's
summit. Traditional surveying techniques require combining countless
individual survey measurements. Each of these measurements has some,
hopefully small, error associated with it. When you combine them, you're
counting on some of the errors cancelling one and other. Still, it's
possible to have the odds stack up against you and end up with fairly
large errors between you're calculated elevation and the true number.

If you were just interested in comparing two points, let's say Mt. Whitney
and White Mountain, you could pick a spot in Owens Valley and take sitings
on both peaks. Then, knowing how far away each peak was, you could
calculate their respective heights. Unfortunately, it's never that easy.
Temperature layers in the atmosphere will bend the light causing the
sitings to be off slightly. A degree or less can easily add up to quite a
bit of error over the long distances involved. My understanding is that
this caused a very long standing question as to the true height of
Mt. Everest.

With the wonders of GPS, this isn't as true as it once was. A few years
ago an expedition left a GPS unit on top of Everest and returned the
following year to retrieve it. That way they got a year's worth of
measurements. I don't know if anybody has done the same with Mt. Whitney.

-Karl

*********************************************************************
Karl "Birdman" Brandt PCT97 LT98
http://people.ucsc.edu/~kbrandt/