Recreation
Walking on the moon in 'House of the Sun'
By Dan Washburn
The Gainesville (Ga.) Times
"This is weird, dude."
Between labored breaths, that's all my friend could say. That's all that needed to be said.
Dan Washburn • The Gainesville (Ga.) Times
We were into mile seven of our 20-mile trek through the volcanic summit area of Haleakala National Park — an unearthly 30,183-acre plot of land located on the eastern portion of Maui — and our surroundings were becoming more and more otherworldly with each step.
The view at Paliku offers striking views with the clouds hanging in the mountains.
Each mile appeared to bring with it a new epoch. There were times I expected Dr. Who to walk up beside us and serve as guide for our adventure.
Hiking in Haleakala is a study in contrasts. Terrain and weather are prone to sudden and dramatic shifts.
Desert gives way to rain forest. Moments of intense sunshine are swiftly swallowed by thick rain clouds.
Sometimes, we learned, the rain clouds don't go away.
Oddly, during my 30 hours inside Haleakala — "House of the Sun" in Hawaiian — I didn't see much of the sun at all. Just glimpses here and there. It added to the area's mystery.
On our first of an intended three days in the park, we traveled roughly 10 miles, from the 10,023-foot Pu'u'ula'ula Summit down the Sliding Sands Trail to the primitive campsite at Paliku, with an elevation of 6,380 feet.
The hike began with a view normally reserved for occupants of airplanes. Clouds, a large white cushion of them, actually existed beneath us and served as a buffer between the red volcanic ash below and the brilliant blue sky above.
Soon we would be walking among the clouds.
We went from a cinder-cone-dotted alpine desert to the base of a rain forest cliff — from the moon to the Earth — in less than four hours, stopping every so often to shake the cinder out of our shoes.
Once the dayhikers were left behind, we walked deep into the desert alone. It was barren. It was beautiful.
The only sound was the lunar landscape crunching beneath our boots. The only sign of life, each other.
Haleakala's "crater" — really a valley carved into the volcano by thousands of years of erosion — is considered the world's largest, and measures 20 miles in circumference. The area's last volcanic activity occurred around 1790, relatively recent in geological terms, thus the volcano is still classified as active.
Weather in the valley can be harsh and unpredictable. The National Park Service likes to say Haleakala is home to "summer every day, winter every night." To be sure, it's not the type of weather most Mainlanders associate with Hawai'i.
We hiked Haleakala during the first weekend in June. It was cool and comfortable for hiking during our first day, cold and somewhat uncomfortable for camping at Paliku that night.
On our second day in the valley, the weather was wet and windy, and ended up cutting our stay short.
Plant life is not plentiful in the cinder desert. The environment is so severe few species can survive, save for the silversword, of course. Known as ahinahina in Hawaiian, the silversword is a peculiar plant unique to Haleakala.
It exists as a colorless rosette of sharp, narrow leaves for up to 50 years before blooming into a tall, fascinating football-shaped cluster of deep, red flowers. Once it blooms, the silversword dies.
Gradually, as we approached Paliku, other plants — some ferns and some flowers — filled in the spaces between the silverswords. Slowly, we began to see subtle hints of the lush rain forest that thrived on the windward side of the ridge we were approaching.
Our path went from volcanic ash to volcanic gravel to volcanic rock. Footing took on more importance. Perhaps the cloud cover, which we walked in and out of, was a blessing. We needed to be watching our step, not our surroundings.
Sometimes that wasn't easy.
The clouds served as curtains for the countryside. Often they would rise and reveal a view so stunning we would be forced to simply stop and stare. Then another cloud would move in, and we would move on.
Two miles from Paliku, a single bird squawked by. It was the first non-human we had seen all day.
The bird was a Hawaiian Goose, the most endangered waterfowl in North America and Hawai'i's official state bird. In 1952, the species declined to nearly 30 in number. Today, approximately 600 live in Hawai'i, and many of those can be found in Haleakala.
Along the final route to Paliku, Haleakala comes to life. Shrubs, even the odd tree, line the path. Birds chirp through the silence.
But there was still a pallor to Paliku.
Red berries and yellow flowers radiated from the landscape, for the most part a dull palette of green, gray and brown. The setting looked like a once black-and-white movie shown midway through its colorization process.
Then a rainbow would appear to brighten the scene. That happened quite often.
We camped beneath the cliffs, and the next morning headed for Holua — the other primitive campsite in the summit area — six miles back through the desert on the Halemau'u Trail.
Weather was predictably unpredictable. Soon it was raining in the desert. Good thing we packed our ponchos.
It was eerie. Clouds clung close to the ground and looked like steam rising from hot ash. The fuzzy outline of cinder cones and crags appeared in the distance as a macabre watercolor painting.
The rain was harder in Holua, and we didn't stay long. Instead of a cold, wet night of camping, we opted for a cold, wet hike up a mountain to our car.
We put our ponchos on our packs and trudged on — four miles of steep switchbacks up a rockface that rises more than 1,300 feet in less than a mile. We winded and winded along the narrow path, with rock on one side and nothing on the other.
I often looked down toward the valley far below, but all I saw were clouds. I'm sure, on a clear day, the view would be worth writing about.
I guess I have got an excuse to head back to Haleakala.
Dan Washburn is an adventure columnist for The Times in Gainesville, Ga. E-mail him at: dwashburn@gainesvilletimes.com.
