Thursday, February 21, 2008

A hike through Haleakela!!!


Today we got  up and I had bacon and cereal for breakfast.  We all decided that today we were going to take a 13 mile hike through a volcano called Haleakela.  We got everyone up and headed for the Haiku grocery store to buy snacks and water for the hike.  When we had everything put together and had our sunscreen on, we headed up the giant inactive volcano.  It's not a very fun road because there's a turn in the road every 25 yards and eventually you get really dizzy and sick so we had to pull over.  When we finally got to the top, we dropped off the girls and me and my dad went to park the car in the lower parking lot where we would come out.  Since we didn't have a car to bring us to the top, we had to hitch hike.  One guy got really annoying and when a big group of cars were going by, he came right in front of us in his big truck and blocked us from the other car's sight making us wait another 20 minutes or so.  When we finally got to the top we set off.  At first I thought it was gonna be cake, I was feeling great as if I could walk forever and the sights were completely amazing.  It was a huge crater that went for miles and it was almost all sand and rocks.  After 4 miles of the hike, we finally got to the bottom of the crater where we took a short break and regrouped.  Little did we know that this wasn't even 1/3 of the hike.  We walked another mile and came to a huge hill that was very tiring but we didn't take a break after that because we had to finish the hike before dark.  We walked another few miles through rocks with not much to see when me and my dad came to an old lava pit which we crawled into and it looked like a huge cave.  My dad cut his hand on the way down because the rocks were very jagged.  After another short time, we came to a cabin where people stay at the bottom of the crater for a couple of days and it looked like paradise to me because they had and amazing sight of a lot of the crater and it was so high up that you could see the clouds beneath you and it felt like you were on top of the world.  After another mile or so we came to the bottom of the exit, a huge, jagged cliff that seemed to go on forever that we had to climb up, it was hell.  Every time we thought it was about to end, there was another switchback and it seemed to go on like that forever.  When eventually we got to the top, we rode back down the twisty road and had to stop because Amelia was feeling sick.  After we got to the bottom, we went to Polli's, our favorite restaurant in Maui and got to bed really early.

1 comment:

schnauzer said...

Cool adventure. Sorry I wasn't with you. Of course, you probably would have had a difficult time keeping up the pace with me. (smile).. GOod job.