A park that starts at ten thousand feet
Haleakalā means house of the sun. The volcano makes up most of eastern Maui, and the national park on it is an odd shape: a summit district up at the top, and a separate coastal district called Kīpahulu down at the water. They are one park, and there is no road connecting them inside it. To get from one to the other you drive back down the mountain and around the island.
The other thing the mountain does is stand taller than the weather. Trade winds hitting the island produce a temperature inversion at roughly six or seven thousand feet, and clouds pile up underneath it. Above that line the air is thin, dry and startlingly clear. You are not looking at the sky from the ground; you are looking down at the top of the weather.
The sunrise you have to book
Sunrise from the summit of Haleakalā is the thing people come to Maui for. It is also, since 2017, a reservation: to enter the summit district between three and seven in the morning you need to have booked a slot in advance. It costs almost nothing. You simply have to have done it.
We had not done it. We drove up long before dawn, in the dark, with children in the back of the car, and were turned back at the gate.
So we parked on the roadside below and waited, on the theory that a sunrise is a sunrise and we would see it from there.
We did not. That is the part worth knowing if you are planning this: below the summit there is nothing to see. The mountain itself is in the way, and more to the point the cloud layer is above you rather than below you. The sunrise at Haleakalā is only the sunrise from the top. Everywhere else on that mountain, the sun simply comes up.
We missed it completely. The kids took it hard, and they were right to — we had got up at three in the morning for it.
The top, later
The reservation only covers the hours before dawn. Once sunrise has passed the gate is simply open to anyone — no booking, no queue — so we drove back up shortly afterwards and had the summit anyway.
It is still one of the strangest places I have stood. Ten thousand feet, air noticeably thinner, the crater dropping away on one side. On the other, an unbroken floor of cloud below eye level stretching to the horizon, with the rest of the island underneath it and out of sight. There is no sense of being on land. It feels like drifting.
Along the skyline sit the white domes of Haleakalā Observatory — the same qualities that make the summit good for sunrise make it good for telescopes. Thin dry air above most of the weather is exactly what an observatory wants, which is why they are up there and why the road exists at all.
A goose that gave up water
Wandering around the summit, entirely unbothered by anyone, are nēnē — Hawaiian geese, and the state bird.
They are descended from Canada geese that arrived here several hundred thousand years ago and never left. What happened next is the thing worth stopping for: over that time they lost most of the webbing between their toes. A goose, on an island of lava, with no particular need to swim and every need to walk on broken rock, quietly gave up being a water bird.
The summit does this to everything. The silversword that grows in the crater and nowhere else on earth is descended from a Californian tarweed, and the honeycreepers in the forest below fanned out from a single finch. Isolation plus time plus an empty landscape produces some very strange residents.
The other half of the park
Days later we drove the other road — the long one out to Hāna, hairpin after hairpin along the coast — to reach Kīpahulu, the seaward half of the same national park.
The Pīpīwai trail climbs inland from there. It passes Makahiku Falls, and then goes through a bamboo forest so dense that the light drops away as you enter it. The stalks knock together overhead in the wind, so the whole place clatters, constantly, from somewhere above your head.
It is hard to believe it is the same park as the summit. That is the thing about Haleakalā: it holds a place where you stand above the weather and a place where you walk under a roof of bamboo, and you have to drive around an entire island to get from one to the other.