Aloha, friends and followers!
I’ve decided to break form just a little bit for this post. Until now, my articles on this website have all fallen into the categories of state highpointing and hardcore hiking and mountaineering.
I do a lot of skiing and never write about it. I also enjoy travel to cool places – sometimes mountainous – with my wife and kids. Never write about it.
Today, I make an exception. This is more of a general travel submission that also just so happens to involve a lofty mountain. The pictures themselves are just way too good not to post on this site.
I first pondered Haleakala, which at 10,023 feet is the tallest mountain on the Hawaiian island of Maui, in 2023 as my family and I planned a nine day Hawaiian getaway to be split equally between the islands of Oahu and Maui. If time allowed while on Maui, my wife and I considered breaking away from the kids for a day to experience a self-guided Haleakala summit sunrise followed by a downhill trek on the Sliding Sands trail.
On our first morning on O’ahu during that August 2023 journey, Laura sent me an extremely alarming text while I was in another room. Maui was on fire. A windstorm on the back end of a tropical storm had exploded some smaller wildfires into a full blown hellscape. The lucky were jumping into the ocean to escape the inferno. The unlucky perished in the night. A national emergency was declared. We canceled our Maui plans and made arrangements to stay on O’ahu for the entirety of our vacation.
Two years later, we found ourselves once again planning family travel to the 50th state. This time, we allotted for 10 days to be divided between Maui and the Big Island. My 22-year-old opted out of this one so it would be just my 16-year-old joining me and Laura.
We arrived at our beautiful oceanside hotel late in the afternoon on June 26th. After a lazy first day, we had a blast jet-skiing on our second full day in Maui. For day three, we considered a nearby hike that never materialized as we instead kept enjoying the sun, sand and surf.
Prior to the trip, we had spoken of options for visiting Haleakala.
During my first trip to Hawaii in 2009, I had completed an extremely arduous hike starting at about 9,200 feet to the 13,726-foot summit of Hawaiian state highpoint Mauna Kea on the Big Island. And during our 2023 Hawaiian trip, I had broken away for a challenging ascent of O’ahu highpoint Mount Ka’ala. So Haleakala stood to be my third Hawaiian Island/County highpoint. Cool.
We considered some different options back home before I finally declared one day that I wanted to visit the summit of Haleakala with both Laura and Brooke on my birthday. So instead of one of my hare-brained adventure schemes that typically start in the dark hours between midnight and dawn, we decided upon a leisurely, no-effort sunset bus tour to the top of Maui. The pickup point would be curbside at our hotel. Grab a hoodie and enjoy the ride.
And so on June 30th at precisely 2:15 PM, a Bike Maui EcoTours mid-sized bus picked us up just outside the Kaanapali Beach Club. And away we went.
We were the first to board and enjoyed a pleasant ride along the coast as the tour bus operator made a few more stops, picking up another 10 or 12 passengers before asking us to share just a little bit about ourselves to break the ice. We passed around a menu and made our food selections for our dinner later in the trip. The Mahi-mahi sandwich sounded perfect to me.
We weren’t quite sure what to expect weather-wise high on Haleakala. I’d been watching the Weather Channel forecast and it didn’t look so great. Cool and cloudy with a chance of rain. So fingers crossed.
The ride east and south across Maui was pleasant as our tour guide warmed up and began telling us about his own personal story of how he wound up on Maui while also sharing many stories of Hawaiian island history and culture. Just before 4 PM, our bus made its first stop at the Morihari Store in Kula for snacks as our tour guide acquired our sunset dinner food choices at the Kula Bistro across the street. We had started to gain elevation and were at about 3,000 feet by this point as the clouds still hung overhead. But I sensed the cloud ceiling was low enough that we would soon drive through the cloud layer and be looking down on the clouds by the time we reached the 10,023-foot summit of Haleakala. Always a cool experience.
As we were just getting ready to stop at the general store, the tour guide had announced that we would go no further than the 9,750-foot upper parking lot … so almost 300 feet lower than the true summit. My wife and I glanced at each other and she shrugged her shoulders indicating the true summit was not meant to be for me on this day.
Oh, no, no, no, thought I, as I immediately began to research the situation online. I quickly found that the round trip distance from our planned parking spot to the summit and back was about a 1.5 mile road hike. Our itinerary called for us to be in the summit area for about 90 minutes. No problem. Plenty of time. Now, the age old question … do I ask permission or forgiveness?
I had noticed my phone was getting low on charge and mentioned this to my wife. Our tour guide overheard us and kindly offered to charge it in the front of the bus. As I handed the phone over for him to plug in, I made more of a statement than a question about going to the summit.
“So it’s OK for us to go off and do our own thing when we’re up top, right? We’re going to go to the true summit.”
The driver/tour guide indicated this was fine and further explained that the only reason he couldn’t take the bus all the way to the summit was that the parking spots are too small for the size of the bus. He added that it was only about a 1/2 mile walk each way. Clearly, the man knew how to earn tips.
After wrapping up our planned stop in Kula, we worked our way east across some town roads, eventually meeting up with the Haleakala Highway, where the ascent began in earnest. We stopped at various outlooks with great vistas every 30 minutes or so to take photos, stretch our legs and acclimate slowly for the 10,000 foot elevation change from our oceanside starting point.
The tour company really had this on lock down and we were all truly enjoying ourselves. The driver said he had not entertained any serious concerns regarding the cloudy weather down low, indicating that he nearly always ends up poking through the cloud layer to clear conditions up high.
That also proved to be the case on this day and it made for a stellar 56th birthday.
We briefly visited Haleakala National Park Headquarters for our 5 PM stop and then continued on, soon leaving the clouds completely below. It was slow going on this meandering mountain road, but in many ways, the gradual ascent added to our ability to fully appreciate all of the unique scenery. I hadn’t expected the lower slopes of this volcanic peak to be so lush and green. It enriched the experience and provided a great contrast to the burnt out lowlands left behind in the wake of the 2023 Maui wildfires.
Back on the road, we soon passed the Halemau’u trailhead at an elevation of about 8,000 feet from which the adventurous can embark on hikes to the summit along the Sliding Sands trail or perhaps hitch a ride back up the the summit after a downhill trek. My wife and I had considered this sweaty Haleakala option, but instead chose the chill guided tour we were now enjoying as a family.
Right around 5:40 PM, we turned left off the main highway and took the very short Leleiwi Overlook Road to the Kalahaku Overlook, which proved to be our best stop thus far. Brooke had a fun photo taken where it looked like she was free-falling through the sky without a parachute. We also enjoyed our first view down into crater at the impressive cinder cones. No more lush lowlands here. Pure volcano.
From here, the next stop was at the upper parking lot, where we first dug into our dinners and then all exited the bus for enjoyment of our chosen vantage point of the sunset. Laura, Brooke and I began our uphill road-walk at 6:45 PM and had plenty time to enjoy the the true summit of Haleakala, also known as as Red Hill or Pu’u ‘Ula’ula.
The views were stunning and the 7:12 PM sunset proved breathtaking. It had been a great day. Following the sunset, we all returned to the bus for some star-gazing followed by the long ride with more Hawaiian history lessons from our awesome tour guide. We had definitely gotten our money’s worth in this departure from my normal rugged individualist mountain ways.
Mark’s Mountain Travels 