I think the most amazing thing about the Azores is the island of Pico, which is the volcano Pico. It rises up from the ocean to an elevation of 7700 feet, 1,000 feet higher than any mountain east of the Mississippi. From where we were in the Horta marina it was only about ten miles over to it, and it dominated the view. I was really impressed. And then I got to here, Tenerife, Canaries. Like Pico in the Azores, Tenerife island in the Canaries is also simply a volcano, named Teide, rising up from the ocean. Except Teide is not 7,700 feet high, it is 12,200 feet high. Wow! It is at the latitude of Cape Canaveral, Fla. and is snow capped in the winter. Well nothing would do but I had to up there.
Here people don't turn left, or turn right. You turn up or turn down. Last week I found my way to the church but had to ask directions how to get back out to the Interstate Highway. I was told to go up the road to the intersection and turn up, then go to the round-about and turn down. (The other directions are left around and right around) You either go up, down, or around. The road starts at El Medano (the windsurfing center) and goes up. You start the car, put it in gear, and drive up. Sometimes in 3rd gear, sometimes in 2nd gear, but up. And windy, as a winding road (not as the wind blows) (maybe I should say "twisty") Turns and twists with one turn leading directly into the next, so that I was turning the steering wheel 270 degrees first one way then the next, up, at 30 kilometers/hour, whatever that is. There was surprizingly little traffic. Most of it was motorcycles going much faster that I was, going up and down. What a fun ride it must be on a motorcycle. I also met several "trains" of four-wheelers, four wheel drive motorcycles. These are called "Four Wheel Safaris". They take maybe 10 of these things to the hotel, pick up the tourists who signed up for an adventure, and off they go. Coming down the road at you they don't really look safe. They must be going 30 mph, and I wonder about how much training the people get. (I guess it is like renting a jet-ski. Show them how, and turn them loose.) So up I drive, and enter the National Park, the 9th most visited national park in the world. One minute I am driving up, then through a pass, then I am inside a volcano. A volcano from the inside, looking up at the ridges around the caldera (if that is the correct word). The landscape is that of an old science-fiction movie, incredibly sharp jagged rocks of different sizes and shapes. (When I say sharp, I have been doing some rock-hopping. At one point my footing was not perfect and I reached out to catch my balance, and sliced the ends of two fingers) Clinkers. The rocks are like clinkers from the coal burning furnace on Iredell Drive. And the landscape looks like the scene from a wild-west movie, with the vertical scale was multiplied times four. The elevation of all of this maybe 8,000 feet. Of course there is a National Park office, visitor's center, hotel, etc. But then another volcano rises up from inside the first. A cable car takes people up to about 11,600 ft, maybe 1,000 feet from the absolute top. I wanted to climb up to 12,000 feet but it was too late in the afternoon. Besides, there is not much air up there. Two tourists "fainted" and were lying down, feet up. It was cool, windy, and jagged. The view was impressive, but not unlike that from an airplane. But the rocks, everything jagged. The edge of the crater was jagged, the individual boulders were jagged, and the structure of the rock itself was jagged enough to to cut your fingers.
A quote from Wikipedia: Teide additionally is considered structurally unstable and its northern flank has a distinctive bulge. This bulge is not believed to be associated with an influx of magma, but stems from a slow northwards collapse of the edifice. The collapse could, in the long term, potentially accelerate into a cataclysmic landslide, which, in turn, could potentially produce a mega tsunami that could cause significant damage and loss of life around coastlines in the Atlantic Ocean. An accepted model shows a tsunami wave 40 meters, 150 feet high along the east coast of the US. Will, in geologic time what is meant by "in the long term" ?
A very impressive place.
Bill Doar
s/v Advent II
No comments:
Post a Comment