Quote:
Originally Posted by Dennis
Wow - what a fantastic opportunity, thanks for the write-up and stunning imagery from your stay up there.
The scale of the observatory structures really become apparent when you see the parked vehicles and the terrain is other-worldly.
Lucky boy indeed. 
Cheers
Dennis
PS - how do motor car engines cope with the reduced atmospheric pressure? |
Thanks Dennis,
The internal combustion engines on the two vehicles we used continued
to operate fine above the 10,000' point but of course their efficiency
would be much lower.
The section of road from the 9200' point to the summit changes from
minimally curving tarmac to well-graded gravel with switchbacks.
There is no guard rail but the road is wide but you take it easy.
That last section of road is advised to be 4WD only. You need to engage
a low gear and not ride the brakes. There is less air to cool the brakes
than there is at sea level. There are no shortage of pictures
and videos on the internet where someone has taken up a 2WD and
ridden the brakes coming down and the vehicle has caught ablaze.
For example :-
https://youtu.be/btrqVlCLpVs
One of the vehicles we had also had real-time tyre pressure level
monitoring and they remained normal.
The highway down from the the summit road to the coast - what is
called the Saddle Road - doesn't muck around either. It just goes down
and down and down. You have to remember to swallow every now and then
for your ears to pop otherwise you begin to wonder why everything has
gone so quiet.
There are some emergency truck run-off spots on the Saddle Highway
going down. It's a superb piece of road engineering with a myriad of
cat's eye reflectors. Apparently their use is not as common in the US
as they are here.
Local Hawaiians are protesting about the construction of the Thirty Metre
Telescope (TMT). They had set up a tent city protest camp and were
blocking the road to the summit right up until two weeks before we arrived.
Operations at the observatories had been shut down as a result for 2
months.
The protesters agreed to move their protest to the side of the road
on the proviso that no TMT workers go up to the summit. So our timing
was lucky.
Hawaiian flags flown upside down were a common symbol of protest not
only over the TMT but as desire to secede from the Union.