Mauna Kea Oral History Appendix - Office of Mauna Kea Management

Tom Vance, working for the Territorial Government, held reverence of Mauna Kea, he said,
“Don’t fool with Mauna Kea.”:
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It’s purpose was to… Well, there is a little background to it, that I think is very important.
They really didn’t know what they wanted to do when they first started. They wanted to
do something, and there is a very important man to me who has passed on. His name
was Tom Vance, and I wrote about his life, and I am very fond of him. We had almost
daily conversations about what we were going to do, to build up this island, “got to feed
the people, and make room for them. Take advantage of all the resources.” Well, he did
all of his work on Mauna Loa, but he worshipped…he had reverence for Mauna Kea. And
when he built the road up Mauna Loa—I have the whole story about how he built the
road—he would frame Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea, if you slice it, Mauna Kea and Mauna
Loa, the area, I have been told, is five time larger on Mauna Loa than on Mauna Kea. So
Mauna Kea sticks up. And he loved to show me these places where he made the Mauna
Loa Road point towards Mauna Kea, and frame it with these big ‘öhi‘a trees. He just
loved it. But he said, “Don’t fool with Mauna Kea. Anything can be done on Mauna Loa.”
And he did.
So it didn’t matter what the purpose was, it had to sort of create it’s own purpose over
time. It started in about 1957, I think, IGY, the International Geophysical Year.
Okay.
And just by chance, there was a researcher at Lahoya named Charles Dave Keeling, and
he had just started measuring carbon dioxide. They were interested in him putting it on
Mauna Loa, and he did. He had wanted to put it on Mauna Kea, there wasn’t anything
over there. But he kind of delayed a year, and he got a Grant to set up the carbon
dioxide, experiments, and it’s a famous index of carbon dioxide since 1958. And along
with that there were other measurements of different things in the air. Principally
ozone…nobody knew what ozone was in those days.
Yes.
The funny thing about it, Dr. Wexler was advocating in those days, he wanted to burn a
hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic to see how it affected the atmosphere, but
nobody talks about that any more. And he was a great guy, and the father of the
meteorological satellite. He pushed them through.
Now, what happened, and the main thing that I regret, I don’t have the date that Dr.
Kuiper first came here. So he is my connection to Mauna Kea.
Okay. Let’s though, for a moment, you spent how many years on Mauna Loa
Twenty years.
And did you drive up
Yes. When we first started, we had to go through Külani Prison, and it was such a
torturous journey that took a couple of hours.
So you drive up Stainback to Külani
Yes.
And then there was a jeep trail
Yes.
It ran mauka, across Keauhou and up to the same location
Yes.
Wow!
Mauna Kea– “Ka Piko Kaulana o ka ‘Äina”
Kumu Pono Associates LLC
A Collection of Oral History Interviews (HiMK67-050606) A:590