Ride to top of Mauna Kea: club formed to erect a monument on the summit

Author:

Sheridan, Sol N.

Title:

Ride to top of Mauna Kea: club formed to erect a monument on the summit

Periodical:

The Pacific Commercial Advertiser

Year:

1906

Pages:

2

Subject:

Lake Waiau Mamane Mauna Kea Summit Quarries and quarrying Mauna Kea

Summary:

The account of an ascending to Mauna Kea on June 24, 1906. Important findings in the trip are excerpted here. At 12,500 feet, they encountered the old Hawaiian quarries "... appeared ... what seemed in the distance a dump pile from an abandoned mine." "Here were the caves in which they dwelt, with rude stone walls built up in front to shelter them from the cold winds of the mountain. Here were the jedges of hard, black, basaltic rock which was the materials most prized in the making of their implements - of war, of fishing, of agriculture, for the service of the gods and the chiefs." "It is said that slaves, taken in war, worked these quarries." "At the highest point, an elevation of 13,825 feet, a mound of rocks is built and in this a can lies that contained lists of the names of those who, in recent years, had climbed the mountain and deposts of silver money made toward a fund for a monument there..." Mauna Kea Association, Limited was formed for the people who reached to the summit. On the way down, they came to "a frozen mass of glacial snow." "The face of that snowbank was higher than the head of a man on horseback and presumably it is there the year around." "From the snow we rode down to the Crater Lake, a clear green pool covering an area of two acres, perhaps, and sheltered in a cup-shaped depression at an elevation of 12,000 feet." "... the coldest drink I have ever taken in these islands, from a mountain spring at an elevation of 10,500 feet that probably seepage from the Crater Lake."

Label:

Mauna Kea - Early Accounts

URL:

https://hilo.hawaii.edu/maunakea/culture/ride-to-top-1906

Date:

July 5, 1906

Collection:

Periodicals