Geography
The highest point in the range is White Mountain Peak, which at 14,252 ft (4,344 m) is the third-highest summit in California. This peak is actually an extinct volcano rising about 1,600 ft (490 m) above the plateau surface. The summit is composed of Mesozoic metavolcanic rock - lava lifted and melted by rising granite. The volcano itself is long since gone. The White Mountains are the highest range completely inside the Great Basin, although the adjacent Sierra Nevada Range along the basin's western edge has two higher summits.
The entire range is within the Inyo National Forest.
Read more about this topic: White Mountains (California)
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Derek Wall (b. 1965)