Maui: 10,000 Feet of Pain

Searing pain. All through my body. That's what I feel hours after coming down from the Haleakala Crater, a volcano on Maui 10,000 feet above sea level.

The air was thin, the hiking was slow and I feel mocked by a couple from Alaska, but in the end I am very pleased at our efforts and glad I made the trek.

And a trek it was. Once you hit the summit (10,023 feet to be exact), you can take in all the expanse of the crater below (shown in the picture above). It's truly breathtaking, because while this is a national park and big highlight mentioned in many tourists books, no one actually comes up here. You kinda get have a run of the place, and you can see for miles and miles, and in either direction you see over the clouds because you drove above them to get up here. It's no Everest, but for a few hours you do indeed feel on top of the world.

The wife, her cousin Madeleine and I then began the hike down. Our original plan was to hike to the Kapalaoa Cabin, 5.8 miles down into the crater (it's about middle-bottom on the map image). Instead, we took a detour and hiked over to the Pu'u o Maui crater (above and between the 1 and 2 on the distance key of the map), one of the several craters left from the volcano's last eruption. It's about 2.6 miles from where we started, and the crater is a little less than a mile around. So the total trip was just over 5 miles total. You can see the wife and Madeleine on the other side of the Pu'u o Maui crater in the photo (and that's at 200 on my 80-200 long lens, so you can tell they are out there).
They say you have an existential/life changing/whatever kind of experience when you are out there, and while I didn't feel closer to god or one with the planet, I can say I felt something. I felt it enough to sit down alone, take out the iPod and crank a three-song setlist and sing loud and clear to echo it into the crater (thankfully, the enormously strong winds carried my voice the opposite direction from everyone else, so no critiques were forthcoming).

This is when the hike got ... ummm ... let's say interesting.

First, as opposed to the easygoing that led us down to the crater, everything back up to the top was ... as you can deduce ... uphill. Seems easy? Call me a chicken? Screw you, you do it, then. It was damn hard work. For all three of us no less. We all heaved and huffed and puffed to get back up to the top. And let us not forget that the reason you can see all these looks from there is because I was carrying 40 pounds of camera gear on my back. Easy to do when strutting around Paris, but much more difficult when up above the clouds and going uphill on trails made of sand.

Equally hurting the ego was the Alaskan couple who were powerwalking up the whole damn hill like it was nothing. As they passed (and no doubt, scoffed with their Palin-lovin voices), we found out they hike in Alaska all the time. But that wasn't the worst part. The worst was struggling to trudge up the hill while all these jolly-ass folks were going down. One couple had a newborn strapped to them in a harness, and that baby couldn't have been 10 months old. I'm sure that baby was eaten when the couple couldn't make it back up with the extra weight and they had to go cannibal. You won't convince me otherwise. They didn't look like they were from Alaska; more like Kansas to me. A few other groups of families with young children flew down the trails past us, and we three proud companions laughed heartily at their ignorance. During one of my seemingly hundreds of breaks to catch my breath and drink some water, I wanted to leave a little mark of the Campbler behind, so I made a little rock totem a few feet off the trail (photo of it at right).

After we reached the top, we raced back down to Paia, a hippie town that has, in my not-so-humble opinion, the best pizza on the planet. Every ounce of the food served is 100% organic and grown right there on the island, from the salad greens to the nitrate-free sausage and pepperoni. It was the best meal we will have on this trip, if nothing else because of the painful, yet wildly invigorating, journey we took to get there.

PS - Oh, and on the drive down the volcano after we left, Madeleine found a footnote buried in the visitors guide that making rock totems is forbidden. Ooops. My bad.