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Happy Birthday California!

September 9, 2013

Happy birthday California (163 years old today!). Here are some amazing California facts from Uncle John’s Plunges into California.

 

16 CALIFORNIA EXTREMES

How much do you know about California’s highest, lowest, oldest, largest, and smallest stuff?

Happy Birthday CaliforniaTALLEST LIVING THING: Hyperion, a 379-foot Sequoia (California redwood) tree located in the Redwood National Park near Eureka. Hyperion’s location in the park is kept secret to prevent it from being damaged by tourists.

SMALLEST MOUNTAIN RANGE: The Sutter Butte Mountain Range near Yuba City. The buttes are a circular volcanic outcropping just 10 miles in diameter.

OLDEST LIVING TREE IN NORTH AMERICA: A 4,842- year-old bristlecone pine in Inyo National Forest outside Bishop.

Named Methuselah (after the oldest person whose age is referenced in the Bible), this pine was a seedling during the Bronze Age, when the Pyramids were going up in Egypt.

LARGEST LIVING TREE: General Sherman, a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park, east of Visalia. Named for Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, this tree weighs more than 2 million pounds, is 275 feet tall, and is the largest tree on earth when measured by its estimated volume of 52,513 cubic feet.

BIGGEST SOLITARY BOULDER: Giant Rock in Landers in the Mojave Desert. At about seven stories high, it weighs more than 23,000 tons.

LONGEST RUNWAY: At Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. It’s 7.5 miles long, and the first space shuttle landed there.

WORLD’S TALLEST ONE-PIECE TOTEM POLE: Built in 1962, the brightly painted 160-foot-tall pole in the McKinleyville Shopping Center was designed by Ernest Pierson, who carved it from a single 500-year-old redwood.

OLDEST CONCRETE BRIDGE STILL IN USE: Fernbridge in Humboldt County. Built in 1911 of reinforced concrete, it crosses the Eel River and is 1,450 feet long.

HIGHEST LANDING PAD ON A BUILDING: The U.S. Bank Tower in downtown L.A. is 1,018 feet high, making it the world’s tallest building with a helipad on the roof. It’s also America’s tallest building west of Chicago.

NORTH AMERICA’S BEST VIEW OF THE WORLD: The 3,849-foot summit of Mt. Diablo in Contra Costa County. It reveals more of the earth’s surface than any other peak in the world, except Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa. Mt. Diablo looks west to the Farallon Islands in the Pacific, east to the Sierra Nevada mountain range, south to the Santa Cruz Mountains, and north to the Cascades.

NORTH AMERICA’S HIGHEST CONCENTRATION OF LAVA TUBE CAVES: Lava Beds National Monument near Tulelake.

The beds formed thousands of years ago when the exterior lava flow cooled and solidified, while the inner hot lava flowed away—creating an empty center and a cave.

NORTH AMERICA’S LARGEST ALPINE LAKE: Lake Tahoe is 12 miles wide, 22 miles long, and 1,645 feet deep.

CALIFORNIA’S HIGHEST MEASURED WATERFALL: Yosemite Falls in Yosemite National Park is actually made of three separate parts: Upper Yosemite Fall, Middle Cascades, and Lower Yosemite Fall together create a 2,425-foot waterfall.

AMERICA’S HIGHEST UNINTERRUPTED WATERFALL: Ribbon Fall is a single waterfall that flows off El Capitan in Yosemite and makes a sheer drop of 1,612 feet.

AMERICA’S LARGEST NATURAL AMPHITHEATER: The Hollywood Bowl. In 1922 it was built into the hillside (like the amphitheaters of ancient Greece and Rome) to aid acoustics.

FIRST ROSE BOWL: The first Rose Bowl game was held on January 1, 1902, at Tournament Park in Pasadena. Michigan defeated Stanford 41–0, when the Stanford players quit with just eight minutes remaining.

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