Researching a Novel: Lost Worlds above the Clouds

It was a dull gray landscape, and as I gradually deciphered the details of it I realized that it represented a long and enormously high line of cliffs exactly like an immense cataract seen in the distance, with a sloping, tree-clad plain in the foreground.

That’s George Edward Challenger describing the Amazonian plateau in Arthur Conan Doyle’sThe Lost World, and it’s a description that came to mind when I got my first look at Mauna Kea — the tallest mountain in Hawaii and (arguably) in the wo...