Talk:Mount Hamilton (California)

Assessment
Importance of this page stems from high visibility and visitation from sf south bay. also association with lick observatorya and grant ranch park and related ecology. Anlace 17:30, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

well i did a major edit to make it conform to the wikiproject:mountain, does anyone have a clearer photo of the mountain? Justinhoude 03:59, May 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * Even the clearest day is a little, er, hazy. I just uploaded a newer one and put it in the main image. The problem is that if you start getting closer to the Mt. Hamilton range to avoid shooting through some of the air, the mountain is so far back that the foothills block your view pretty quickly. Elf | Talk 03:24, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Brickyard
Whare is the brick yard or brickyard?

Heights and locations of peaks: I'm trying to figure out whethere there are really definitive heights for these things. Probably USGS would be best. So far, eg., peakbagger says that Copernicus is 4360 and hamilton is 4213; Bay Nature says 4209-foot Hamilton, 4230-foot Isabel, and 4372-foot Copernicus; etc; and I'm not having much luck searching the USGS site. Elf | Talk 21:32, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * I used the numbers from the USGS, i'm assuming theyre the most accurate. but yea, nothing about kepler peak. Justinhoude 03:59, May 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * Based on the topo map and the observatory's website, I changed this to say that Copernicus is the main summit of Mt. Hamilton, with Observatory and Kepler Peaks as lesser summits. Isabel is a separate mountain.
 * —wwoods 10:15, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Observation
I grew up at Lick Observatory where I graduated from the 8th grade in the one-room school in 1953 with one other student (largest graduating class in >10 years) and moved away permanently in 1960. I know exactly where the "brickyard" is. According to Google Earth v.4.0, it is at 37.342186,-121.650430 degrees(latitude,longitude) at an elevation of 3661 ft. The brickyard is where the bricks were made that went into the construction of the main building and the first dormitory, which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. In the 1950s there was still a sizeable amount of leftover bricks that were covered with soil to keep errant visitors from taking them. However, I'm sure there are none left by now.

Slightly west and downhill of the brickyard was a small barn and corral that is probably dust by now. And the "golf links" were barely southwest of the brickyard. I can't imagine anyone ever playing any kind of even primitive golf in that uneven ground, but I clearly remember seeing hole markers there when I was a kid.

Kepler peak is east of the observatory and is where the large water storage tanks are located, one in-ground and the other above ground, that serve the observatory. Copernicus peak is northeast of Kepler, and a fire lookout tower was located on its summit. The tower was manned (or "womanned") during the fire season and maintained by the forest service facilities located at the Smith Creek Ranger Station, which is between Hall's Valley (now Grant Regional Park, named after the former Grant Ranch there) and the observatory.

The comment about there being "365 turns, as many as days in the year" in the road is well known, but I doubt anyone has verified it. We used to add, for the consternation of visitors, that on leap year the visitors went off the road on February 29. Many of the turns and places in the road have colorful and rather descriptive names (horseshoe, hairpin, rocky point, sandy point, rim-of-the-world, China Camp, 17-minute tree, windy gap, oh my, false oh my, devil's elbow, etc.), and these names would be used occasionally by the residents to estimate arrival times or locate someone in trouble. As of a couple of years ago when I last visited Lick, the 17-minute tree was still there and can be seen in Google Earth if you know exactly where to look. That tree is an oak, clearly visible from the summit, that got its name from the time it took for the early horse-drawn stage (not stagecoach) to arrive at the observatory from that location.

-- Comments submitted by Bruce Mayall (send-no-spam@cox.net). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.5.232.40 (talk) 07:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC).

blurred coordinates
something is wrong with coordinates upper right, blurred image--Billymac00 (talk) 00:54, 5 February 2008 (UTC)