Advertisement
Published: February 23rd 2010
Edit Blog Post
Above the Clouds
Middle of the night with the full moon shining down on us. We landed in Maui in mid afternoon of the 27th and were picked up by a wonderful woman named Chris who gave us food to eat, a place to stay, but most of all the comfort of knowing that we had somewhere to which we could return after each of our adventures. That night Austin and I took a little stroll up the streets of Wailuku, playing Frisbee and basking in the fact that we were in Hawai'i.
The next day is when the adventures began. We packed up our clothes, gear, and food for a short trip up to the summit of Haleakala, the mountain comprising the western side of Maui. It rises straight from the sea to an elevation of 10,000+ ft and it's 38 miles from Kahului to the summit.
On the way to the summit we had to run all around town to get camping permits and fuel for our stove. A nice guy at the camping office gave us a ride to wal-mart and then we took a bus to get us started toward the maountain. We hiked out of town away from the bus stop until a local was willing to
Coming up for Sunrise
This is the streak of a car in the early morning coming up to join us to see the sun rise from 10,023 ft. take us up the mountain … or so we thought. Once we got in the truck he turned around and headed down saying that this was a better way to get where we were going … ? Anyway, he dropped us off at a gas station where the people there confirmed what we had thought, that the local had taken us in the wrong direction, but had enough pity on us to get us to the bottom of Crater road (the road that dead ended into the campsite where we were going to spend the night). By the time he dropped us off it was already 6:00pm and we were shrouded by the heaviest fog he'd ever seen on the Haleakala, and he'd lived there for 20+ years. We began to hike what we thought to be a 5 or 6 mile road up to the campsite. We had been hiking for a long while, not having any luck catching a ride but ok with that because we figured we were like 2 or 3 miles into our 6 mile journey … when we hit the 1 mile marker. We were totally distraught that we decided to take a little
break and look at the map to see if it could possibly be that we had only gone one mile. To our dismay not only had we only gone 1 mile but the journey that we had thought to be a total of 6 miles actually turned out to be a 12 mile road.
We literally hiked for the rest of the night. No one driving up the mountain cared enough to stop and pick us up and so we rolled into Hosmer Grove campsite in Haleakala National Park at a little past midnight … 6 hours of hiking up a winding mountain road. We decided to screw our plans to cook dinner and just ended up having peanut butter and Jelly in the tent once we had set up camp and passed out at nearly 1:00am only to wake at 5:00 to make it all the way up to the summit for sunrise. Luckily a Canadian couple, Christian and Veronic, drove us up there.
The sunrise was well worth it. I can't say I was expecting it to be as cold as it was because one of our first real days in Hawai'i it was
Cold Morning
Austin and I at the summit for sunrise freezing for one of our first days in Hawai'i of all places. in the lower 40's at the summit. After sunrise we found another couple to drive us all the way down the mountain straight into the center of Kahului leaving us only to get back to Wailuku and Chris's house.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.062s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 29; dbt: 0.027s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb