Mount Adams (Washington)

Mount Adams
Aerial view
height	3743  m
location	State Washington , United States
Mountains	Cascade chain
Coordinates	46 ° 12 ′ 9 ″  N , 121 ° 29 ′ 27 ″  W Coordinates: 46 ° 12 ′ 9 ″  N , 121 ° 29 ′ 27 ″  W
Topo map	USGS Mount Adams East
Type	Stratovolcano
Age of the rock	<275,000 years
First ascent	1854 by AG Aiken
Normal way	Snowfields

Mount Adams is a stratovolcano in the Cascade Mountains and after Mount Rainier the second highest mountain in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America . It is known as Pahto or Klickitat by some Indian tribes .

John Adams , the second President of the United States , is the namesake of the volcano.

Mount Adams is located in the remote wilderness of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest , about 35 miles east of Mount St. Helens volcano .

history

The first written record of the mountain is from 1805 by members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition . In 1901, mountaineer and settler CE Rusk led some glacier experts, including Harry Reid, to the mountain. Reid led the first systematic studies of the mountain and named the largest glacier . Eighty years later, the first official scientific research by the USGS took place.

In 1929 and 1931, Wade Dean had a plot of land on the summit plateau (0.8 square kilometers) registered. He was looking for sulfur springs, built a path and transported a drilling rig to the summit area, with which he made test drilling. After not finding sufficient sources, the project was discontinued in 1959.

glacier

Ice (mostly in the form of glaciers ) covers about 16 square kilometers of the upper summit. The ice is nourished by precipitation . The porous rock allows the water to exit again as a source.

Glaciers cover 2.5 percent of the surface (during the last ice age it was about 90 percent). Most of the extensive glaciers, such as the Adams, Klickitat, Lyman, Salmon and White, originally descended from the summit .

geology

Volcanism in the Mount Adams area began in the late Pleistocene , around 940,000 years ago. To date, around two dozen smaller explosive eruptions can be detected in the summit area and on side craters. On the flanks at an altitude between 2,100 and 2,600 meters there are six lava flows, the most powerful of which was formed 7000 to 4000 years ago and some reached a length of over ten kilometers. The last eruption around 1000 years ago resulted in a tephra deposit and probably a small lava flow on the eastern flank. The volcano has a volume of 350 cubic kilometers, making it the second largest stratovolcano in the Cascade Range after Mount Shasta . The mountain consists of several overlapping caps with a total diameter of 29 kilometers in a north-south direction and covers an area of ​​650 square kilometers. Mount Adams was formed by the plate tectonics of the Juan de Fuca Ridge , which lies on the coast of the Pacific Northwest area.

literature

• Stephen L. Harris : Fire Mountains of the West: The Cascade and Mono Lake Volcanoes , Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula; 1988, ISBN 0-87842-220-X

Web links

Commons : Mount Adams (Washington)  - Collection of images, videos, and audio files

• Mount Adams (Washington) on Peakbagger.com (English)
• Mount Adams on Bivouac.com (English)

Footnotes

1. ^ Judy Bentley: Hiking Washington's History. University of Washington Press, Seattle 2010, ISBN 978-0-295-99063-7 , p. 130 .