Haleakalā summit road: Park Headquarters to Puʻuʻulaʻula and back to Kalahaku

At the start of the tour

Welcome to Haleakalā summit road

Aloha, and welcome to Haleakalā National Park. I'll be your guide on the road up the mountain, from Park Headquarters to the summit, and then to one last overlook on the way back down.

The name means house of the sun, and you'll hear the story behind it as we climb. The park's section of this road zigzags for nearly eleven miles from the entrance to the summit. Over that distance it climbs about three thousand more feet, to ten thousand and twenty-three feet above the sea. Up top it's at least twenty degrees colder than at sea level, and it often drops below freezing, so keep a warm layer close.

The climb starts in native shrubland, where hardy shrubs hold the slopes and the native Hawaiian goose often walks right along the roadside. Near the top, the shrubs thin out into a dry alpine cinder desert, where only a few kinds of plants can survive.

This mountain is sacred to Native Hawaiians. The summit area is part of the realm of the gods, and for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years people have come up here for ceremony, to study the stars, and for stone. Those practices continue today. If you see people practicing their traditions, please give them room and quiet.

Close to the entrance station is Hosmer Grove. Ralph Hosmer, who became the territory's Superintendent of Forestry in 1904, planted thirteen kinds of trees there, from pines to eucalyptus, to find out which could grow at this height and help control erosion. Today the grove is one of the best places in the park to hear native forest birds.

Here's how this works: I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there, starting at our first stop, the Park Headquarters Visitor Center.

Point 1 · At the stop

Park Headquarters Visitor Center

This is the Park Headquarters Visitor Center, at about seven thousand feet. Rangers and volunteers here can tell you about current conditions, hikes and ranger programs, and the park store is run by the Hawaiʻi Pacific Parks Association, with proceeds going to park programs.

The land around you has changed hands more than once. In 1848, in the Great Māhele, when land in the kingdom was divided into private ownership, most of what is now this part of the park went to Kamaikaaloa, a man of chiefly lineage who served as a land manager for King Kamehameha the Third. Forty years later, in 1888, Haleakala Ranch bought the land from his estate, and for many years it grazed cattle on these slopes. Many of the old rock walls you'll see on the mountain were built by the ranch in the late 1800s.

In 1916, Congress created Hawaii National Park, which took in this mountain together with Mauna Loa and Kīlauea on the Big Island. Most of the money went to the active volcano there, so things moved slowly on Maui. The ranch still owned much of the land until 1928, when it traded it to the federal government.

Today the park protects more than thirty thousand acres of Maui, and about four-fifths of that is designated wilderness. From here on, nearly everything you'll see is native ground, and the higher we go, the less of it was ever meant for people to stay.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Leleiwi Overlook

Next, we're heading to Leleiwi Overlook. On the way up, here's the story of the road under your wheels.

Until the twentieth century there was no road up this mountain at all. People came on foot or on horseback, and it was a hard trip. Tourism had reached Maui by the 1890s, and the summit was the island's prime attraction. The ranch, tour companies and others led guided horseback trips to the top.

By 1911, visitors were slowly increasing, but Kīlauea, on the Big Island, was drawing more of them, because you could get there by road. So Maui began to want a road of its own. The idea took two decades to come true. In the 1930s, federal aid programs created after the Great Depression finally paid for it, and the Territory of Hawaiʻi and the National Park Service set out together to build a road from Kahului all the way to the summit.

Not everyone wanted it. From the start, the Maui News reported, Hawaiians protested building a road on the sacred mountain and believed the gods would bring disaster on the project. Any misfortune or setback was blamed on the demigod Māui, his mother, and a rooster named Kalauhelemoa, all from the story of how the sun was snared. And a novelist from one of Maui's ranching families, Armine von Tempski, reportedly complained that the road robbed the mountain of its adventure.

The Park Service wanted the road built to the highest engineering standards while protecting the landscape. Some of the best-known names in the agency worked on it, including Director Horace Albright and the landscape architects Thomas Vint and Merel Sager. One plan would have run the road right through the crater. Another would have ended it at the old rest house at Kalahaku. Both ideas were rejected. Instead, the road was designed as a journey: it leads you up through the shrubland without giving away the grand finale until the very end, where you leave the car and walk to the edge.

Work on the park's section began in 1933 and took two years, with two hundred and fifty-five men and a budget of about three hundred and seventy thousand dollars. To protect the land, construction access roads were forbidden, so the crews and their machines had to work inside a right of way only fourteen feet wide. The culverts and gutters, and the project's one bridge, were built or faced with lava-rock masonry, to sit quietly in the landscape. And it was the first highway in the islands with super-elevated curves, banked so steeply that, the Maui News wrote, they came close to making it fool-proof against reckless driving.

The road opened on February the twenty-third, 1935. There was hula, music, speeches in the park, and a lūʻau at the fairgrounds back down the mountain. More than sixteen hundred people came, in three hundred and twenty cars. NBC radio broadcast the ceremony from a temporary shed to about sixty-five stations across the United States, and it was said to have reached ten million listeners. The Maui Chamber of Commerce, which had pushed hard for the road, hired a full-time publicist and adopted a slogan: Bring the World to Maui.

It worked. By the end of 1935, visits to the park had risen by four hundred and fifty-five percent. The park assigned its first full-time ranger to the mountain that year. And in the winter of 1936, many people from around Maui played in the summit snow for the first time in their lives.

Today more than a million people a year come up this road. The protests are part of its history too, and the park says it must keep working with the community to protect the sacred summit that the road made so easy to reach.

Point 2 · At the stop

Leleiwi Overlook

This is Leleiwi Overlook, at about eight thousand eight hundred feet. The name translates as bone altar. It was recorded on early maps of the crater, but the history behind the name has been lost.

The overlook itself is at the top of a short trail, about three-tenths of a mile there and back, climbing around a hundred feet in steps to the edge of the crater. The Park Service built it in 1966, as part of Mission 66, a nationwide program to improve visitor centers, campgrounds and trails. Near the trailhead are the remains of a stone wall that ranchers built in the late 1800s to guide cattle through this rough country.

From the top, on a clear day, you look into the crater and out through two great breaks in its walls. To the left, the Koʻolau Gap opens down toward Maui's north shore. Just left of that gap, look for switchbacks on the cliff: that's the Halemauʻu Trail, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The older trail there, used by Hawaiians to cross the crater and later by ranchers moving cattle, has eroded away. Farther to the right, in the distance, is the Kaupō Gap.

Both gaps were carved by erosion over many thousands of years. Later eruptions poured into those valleys and filled them, which is why their floors are so flat. Two of the most recent eruptions are still easy to see from here, both within the last thousand years.

Some days the trade wind inversion fills the crater with clouds, and this spot can still be worth the walk around sunrise or sunset. When you stand between a low sun and a bank of cloud below you, your shadow can appear on the clouds, ringed by a faint rainbow. It's called the Brocken specter, and it's about as close as most of us will come to wearing a halo.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Haleakalā Visitor Center

Next, we're heading to the Haleakalā Visitor Center, on the rim of the crater. So it's time for the story behind the name: the house of the sun.

Long ago, the sun ran quickly across the sky. There was hardly time to prepare and cook food, and even a prayer could not be finished before darkness fell. The demigod Māui's mother, Hina, had trouble drying her kapa, the bark cloth that was the only clothing and bedding in old Hawaiʻi. The cloth is made from the bark of the wauke plant, beaten and processed, and before it can be worn it has to dry in the sun. But the sun passed over so quickly that by the time she had laid it all out, it was dark, and she had to gather it back up again.

So her son decided to slow the sun down. He climbed to the top of the ridges of ʻĪao Valley to watch its path, and saw that it rose up the eastern side of this mountain and passed over the top. He went home to his mother with a plan. She gave him fifteen strong cords, and told him to find the place on the mountain where a large wiliwili tree grows. That is where your grandmother lives, she said, and the sun stops there to eat the bananas she cooks. Wait until the rooster crows three times, and when your grandmother comes out to prepare the bananas, take them.

He climbed the mountain to Kaupō and found the tree. After the rooster crowed, his grandmother came out with a bunch of bananas and set them down while she worked. She was blind, and he took them easily. When she reached for them and found them gone, she sniffed the air, smelled a man, and asked who was there. He told her he was her daughter's son, and that he had come to kill the sun for going so fast that his mother's cloth could never dry.

His grandmother gave him one more cord, and a stone for an adze, and told him how to catch the sun. He hid by the tree to wait. As the sun's legs came into view, he snared them one by one. The sun tried to go back down the mountain into the sea, but he tied the cords to the tree and hauled it back up. He struck it with the adze until the sun begged for its life and promised to go more slowly. And ever since, the days have been long enough to dry the cloth, cook the food, and finish a prayer.

The park points out that stories like this one explain how the world works, here the movement of the sun across the sky, and that they have been shared by many people over a long time, so versions can differ, sometimes a lot.

One more thing before you step out at the rim. To Hawaiians, the rocks up here are not just minerals left by cooling lava. They are one of the physical forms of Pele, the volcano goddess: a creator of land as well as a destroyer, praised and feared. Every year visitors take pieces of her home, which Hawaiians see as disrespectful. So please leave every rock and cinder where it lies. It's also against the law to take anything from a national park.

Point 3 · At the stop

Haleakalā Visitor Center

This is the Haleakalā Visitor Center, at nine thousand seven hundred and forty feet, on the rim. The road was designed to end here, at the edge, so that the view would be the grand finale once you walked to the rail.

What you're looking into is called a crater, but it isn't one, and it isn't a caldera either. It's a valley carved by water. Two great river valleys on opposite sides of the volcano cut their way upstream for hundreds of thousands of years until they met at the summit. They reach the crater at the two gaps, Koʻolau to the north and Kaupō to the east. That's why the shape is more like an S or a W than a circle.

It's roughly seven and a half miles long and two and a half miles wide, and at its deepest about three thousand feet. It was once twice as deep. Over the last several thousand years, eruptions have partly filled the floor with lava flows and cinder cones, the multicolored hills scattered across it. There are fourteen of them. The colors are chemistry: the reds and blacks come mostly from different amounts of rust in the iron of the lava and cinder, and the oranges and greens are mostly plants growing among the rocks.

The trail that drops in from near this parking lot is Keoneheʻeheʻe, the sliding sands. The Civilian Conservation Corps built it in 1937, part of about twenty miles of trail they built through the crater. It descends about three thousand feet to the floor.

The small hill beside the visitor center has its own name, Pā Kaʻoao, which means the fences of a chief of that name. More than a hundred stone enclosures stand on its leeward side. The story is that in the 1600s a chief from the east side of the island and his army, fleeing a rival, built them here as shelter for the night.

Inside, the exhibits tell the mountain's story in both Hawaiian and English, a first for national park sites in the region. And outside, at the rail, the air is thin, so take your time.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Puʻuʻulaʻula Summit

Next, we're heading to Puʻuʻulaʻula, the summit, and the highest point on Maui.

On the way, it's worth knowing how big this mountain really is. Hawaiian volcanoes are shield volcanoes, built from thin layer after layer of lava into a long, gently curved shape, like a warrior's shield. Only about five percent of this one stands above the sea. Measured from the sea floor it rises about twenty-eight thousand feet, and the park calls it the third-tallest mountain on Earth. The summit may once have reached fifteen thousand feet above sea level. Erosion has worn it down, and the mountain is so heavy that it has begun to sink into the Earth's crust.

The Pacific Plate is carrying it northwest, about four inches a year, away from the hot spot that built it. One day it will lose that connection and go extinct. But not yet. Its last eruption, on the southwest flank, was only four to six hundred years ago, and it has erupted at least ten times in the past thousand years. For now, as the park puts it, the volcano seems content to rest.

Point 4 · At the stop

Puʻuʻulaʻula Summit

This is Puʻuʻulaʻula, the red hill, at ten thousand and twenty-three feet: the highest point in the park and on the island. The summit building beside the parking area gives shelter from the wind, with windows all the way around. On a clear day the view goes in every direction: down into the crater, across to the West Maui Mountains, and out over the other islands and the open Pacific.

The domes and buildings on the next hill are observatories. They are not part of the park, and they are not open to the public.

People studied the sky from this summit long before there were telescopes. Hawaiian navigators came up here to study the movements of the stars, priests conducted ceremonies, and adze makers came for stone.

Look around the summit for silverswords. Their Hawaiian name is ʻāhinahina, and this subspecies grows only here. The silvery hairs on its leaves protect it from the intense sunlight and help it collect moisture from the mountain mist. A silversword can live for decades, but it blooms only once. It sends up a towering stalk of purple flowers, scatters its seeds to the wind, and dies soon after.

Visitors once pulled them up and took them home as souvenirs. Today they depend on the park: fences keep out the grazing animals that eat them, staff remove the weeds that crowd them, and researchers are studying how hotter, drier years affect them. Their roots are fragile, so stay on the paths and admire them from a distance.

Mornings up here can be at or below freezing, and the wind rarely lets up, so find your sunrise spot, or your view of the clouds below, and take your time.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Kalahaku Overlook

Next, we're heading to Kalahaku Overlook, the last stop of the tour, on the way back down the mountain.

Long before there was a road, people were crossing this mountain. In old Hawaiʻi it was a major route for travel: the trails through the crater made it easier to reach East Maui. But the summit was never a place to live. Native Hawaiians never built permanent settlements in the realm of the gods. They came for a purpose, and they built small stone enclosures, called pā, to shelter from the fog, the rain and the cold wind.

One of those purposes was stone. This mountain holds the biggest adze quarry on Maui, used from about the year twelve hundred to seventeen hundred, and possibly later. Its basalt is unusually fine-grained and dense, with no air bubbles, ideal for the koʻi, the adze: an axe-like tool for cutting down trees and carving canoes and houses. Specialist adze makers came up the mountain to find the perfect stone. They chipped out rough blades, leaving hundreds of stone flakes behind, used nearby caves as shelters while they worked, and carried the unfinished blades down to villages near the coast to be ground and polished. The chiefs controlled the quarries, and the finished adzes were prized, part of the economy and the politics of the islands.

The first anthropologist to survey this wilderness was Kenneth Emory, of the Bishop Museum, in 1920. In 1922 he came back, with the Hawaiian scholar Thomas Maunupau as his guide, and the two became lifelong friends. The scholar wrote about the expedition in a Hawaiian-language newspaper, and saw it as a way to look at Hawaiian culture and uplift it with importance and dignity.

Some of the sites those early surveys excavated held human burials, which today is seen as wrong to disturb. Everything that was removed from them has since been returned to the mountain and properly cared for by kūpuna, Hawaiian elders.

Stone shelters, worn trails and quarry flakes: up here, the traces people left are small, and they were made by people who knew they were guests.

Point 5 · At the stop

Kalahaku Overlook

This is Kalahaku Overlook, at about nine thousand three hundred feet, on the edge of the pali, the cliff. A walk of about a tenth of a mile leads to a simple shelter with a wide view over the crater and its cinder cones, from a different angle than the one at the visitor center.

People have rested here for a long time. In 1894, a group of Maui businessmen built a rest house on this spot, designed by the architect Charles W. Dickey, and called it Craigielea. In 1914, the Maui Chamber of Commerce built a new shelter, to hold more visitors and to replace what vandals had damaged. Back then the only way up the mountain was on foot or on horseback, and tired travelers were glad of a roof against the weather. The building was rebuilt again in 1957, and the shelter you see now is in the Mission 66 style: glass and steel, simple and low-cost, the Park Service Modern look you'll find at visitor centers all over the country.

On the ocean side of the parking lot there's an area marked Silversword Area. There used to be many silverswords here, but in recent years many have died as rainfall has decreased, which may be linked to a changing climate.

This cliff is also a nesting ground for the ʻuaʻu, the Hawaiian petrel, the only endangered seabird in Hawaiʻi. They dig burrows into steep slopes, mate for life and lay just one egg a year, so a single disturbance can cost a whole season. They hunt squid far out at sea and come back to their burrows after dark. At night you might hear them, a low oo-ah-oo. That's why the walking areas here are marked: the rocks beside the path may be someone's home. Watch, too, for the native goose, which likes this overlook as well.

And that's the end of the tour. For as long as people have climbed this mountain, they've come to watch the light, and the mountain has stayed what it always was: a sacred place. Mahalo for riding up with me, and take your time on the way down.

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