6 fascinating facts about California: Badwater and baby carrots edition
1. California is home to the contiguous United States’s highest and lowest points: Mount Whitney (14,505 feet above sea level) and Badwater Basin (282 feet below sea level). Also crazy: They’re only about 80 miles apart. Ultrarunners consider the route between the two an ultimate test.
// Backpacker Magazine
2. In 1986, a Bakersfield farmer named Mike Yurosek grew frustrated with discarding carrots that were too twisted or knobby to sell. So he came up with the idea to shave them into smaller, cuter versions and called them “baby-cut” carrots. Yurosek rang up one of his best customers, a Vons in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘I’m sending you some carrots to see what you think,’” he recounted in a 2004 interview with USA Today. “Next day they called and said, ‘We only want those.’”
The baby-carrot craze had begun. In 1985, the average American was eating fewer than 7 carrots a year. By 1997, that figure had doubled.
// USA Today
3. Stanford’s founding president was a leading proponent of eugenics. David Starr Jordan championed sterilization of the “unfit” on the grounds that “the germs of pauperism and crime” were biologically inherited.
Just last month, a Palo Alto middle school named after Jordan chose to shed the unfortunate association. Its new namesake will be Frank Greene Jr., a pioneering African-American technologist.
// Stanford Magazine | Mercury News
4. The world’s tallest, largest, and oldest known trees are all in California. Hyperion, a coastal redwood in Redwood National Park, is the tallest, rising a staggering 380 feet, equivalent to about 35 stories. General Sherman, a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park, is the largest by volume at about 52,500 cubic feet, enough to fill roughly 20 typical swimming pools.
The world’s oldest individual tree is an unnamed bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of eastern California that is estimated to date back more than 5,060 years. That means it was born about 150 years after the invention of writing at a time when woolly mammoths still roamed the earth.
// Wikipedia | Live Science
5. The world’s largest geothermal area is nestled in the Mayacamas Mountains of Northern California. The Geysers, as the region is known, covers about 45 square miles in Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino counties.
Native Americans used to visit the thermal areas, believing the vapor produced by intense heat below the earth’s surface had curative properties. Today, steam drawn from hundreds of wells at the Geysers spins mighty turbines that, in turn, satisfy nearly 60 percent of the power demand for the coastal region from San Francisco to the Oregon border.
// Calpine | Lake County News
6. A bakery opened in Yreka in 1856 called Yreka Bakery, a palindrome. A newspaper ad read: “Spell Yreka Bakery backwards and you will know where to get a good loaf of bread.” After the bakery closed in the 1960s, its site was occupied by an art store named Yrella Gallery, also a palindrome.
// Wikipedia
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