Haleakala National Park
Haleakala is a 10,000 foot high volcano on the island of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands.
Perhaps- its more accurate to say that Haleakala is the island of Maui.
A flat stretch of valley connects it to the much smaller West Maui Mountains.
This isthmus, along with a thin skirt of beaches around Haleakala, contains
most of the habitable land, and population. You won't see any pictures
of Haleakala in the distance on this page, because you would have to go
far out to sea to get one. Haleakala thrusts 30,00 feet up from the sea
floor. It would be taller than Everest if the first 20,000 feet weren't
under the sea. This photo was taken from atop Haleakala looking west across
the isthmus to the West Maui Mountains, here hidden in clouds.
This photo is of the pre-dawn sky at the summit of Haleakala. Watching the
sunrise from the rim of the crater atop Haleakala is a sublime experience. On this
morning an unbroken layer of clouds, just below the summit, streamed past
on all sides. The low angle of light hid the crater below, leaving no reference
point, and the other-worldly feeling that the clouds were still, and we
were sailing over them. To see the sunrise you'll have to drive up a winding
mountain road in the dark. Also, despite the latitude, at 10,000 feet winter
comes with every nightfall. Dress for freezing weather.
The sun has climbed high enough to peek over the tops of the clouds, and
reveal the vast crater at the top of Haleakala.
In this photo we are looking opposite the sunrise at the shadow
of Haleakala casting itself across the summit, and the cloud-tops below.
The white buildings in the middle of the photo are a astronomical observatory,
that takes advantage of the thin air, and dark skies.
This photo was taken from the Sliding Sands trail that descends from the PUUULAULA
Visitor Center on the rim down to the crater floor. The alititude can make
hiking in Haleakala crater more difficult. The weather is changeable. On
the morning of this hike intermitent fog banks swept past, and I changed
in, and out of my winter jacket. The hike takes you past huge cinder cones,
and boulders as large as houses. The only vegetaion are the silversords.
These are round tufts of blade like white leaves, that dot the lanscape.
Down on the crater floor, surronded by the high rims, and the naked rocky
soil- its easy to forget that your on earth.
This view is from the craggy rim down into the crater 2,000 feet below. The irregular crater is immense, 21 miles in circumference. The floor is studded with cinder cones, as high as 600 feet, and covered in pumice, gravel, and other volcanic eruption debris.
Like all the Hawaiian islands Maui was formed by a plume of molten rock rising up from the earth's interior. The plume punches holes in the crust of the pacific plate, as it slides eastward, leaving a trail of volcanoes. The big island of Hawaii is the youngest of these volcanoes, and the largest. Behind it trails a line of succesively older, and smaller volcanic islands. Erosion has worn down the most ancient islands to nothing more than a line of dots on the map. Haleakala is the second in this line, although its not yet completely dormant. Its last eruption was in the 1790's. Eventually Haleakala will also erode to nothing more than a few debris poking above the surface, like its long dead cousins to the west.
All images © John Donohue, 1995,1996