Haleakalā
Interesting facts
- Haleakalā makes up more than three-quarters of Maui; the western quarter of the island belongs to a separate volcano, the West Maui Mountains.
- The volcano began forming about two million years ago and, before erosion carved its summit basin, may have stood around 3,700 metres high.
- Its last eruption was long dated to around 1790 from old explorers' maps, until radiocarbon dating pushed it back by two centuries or more.
- Haleakalā has erupted about ten times in the past thousand years and is the only volcano on Maui still considered active.
- The summit has a cold-summer Mediterranean climate, Köppen type Csc, found in only a handful of places on Earth.
- The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope near the summit, with a 4-metre aperture, is the largest solar telescope in the world.
- In 2017 the Pan-STARRS survey telescope on Haleakalā detected ʻOumuamua, the first known object to enter the Solar System from interstellar space.
- When built, Pan-STARRS's camera was the largest digital camera ever made, recording almost 1.4 billion pixels in each image.
- To protect rare forest birds from avian malaria, about 250,000 male mosquitoes whose offspring cannot hatch were being released on the mountain each week by 2024.
- The highest point of Haleakalā is a cinder cone called Puʻu ʻUlaʻula, meaning Red Hill.
Why it is worth it
Haleakalā is the great shield volcano of East Maui, rising to 3,055 metres (10,023 ft). Its name is usually translated as "house of the sun", and Hawaiian tradition places at the summit the home of the demigod Māui's grandmother; from here, the story goes, Māui lassoed the sun and forced it to slow its passage across the sky so that days would be long enough for work to be done and cloth to dry. Standing on the rim at dawn, above a floor of cloud, the legend feels less like metaphor than like description.
What people call the crater is not a volcanic crater at all. It is a vast summit depression, roughly eleven miles long and nearly 800 metres deep, shaped by erosion rather than by an explosion, and later partly refilled by eruptions. Its floor is a bare landscape of rust, ochre, grey and black volcanic cinder, the colours shifting as clouds pass over. The volcano is considered dormant rather than extinct: radiocarbon dating places its most recent eruption somewhere between about 1480 and 1600.
The summit is also a botanical island. On these cinder slopes grows the Haleakalā silversword, a spiky globe of silver-haired leaves found nowhere else on Earth. The dry, clear, stable air that lets it survive also drew astronomers: the summit area known as Science City hosts a cluster of observatories run by several institutions. Most of the mountain's upper slopes are protected within Haleakalā National Park, much of which is designated wilderness; a trail descends from the summit area into the depression for those who want to walk among the cones rather than look down on them.
Getting there
The summit district of Haleakalā National Park is reached by road from Kahului: Highway 37, then 377 and 378 (Haleakalā Highway, opened in 1935), a winding climb that the park service estimates at about two and a half hours from Kahului. The nearest town is Kīhei, about 21 km away as the crow flies, though the drive is much longer. The small Hana Airport (HNM) is the closest airfield in a straight line, about 26 km away, but Kahului Airport (OGG), Maui's main airport, is the practical arrival point. There is no public transport to the park, no fuel inside it.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Haleakalā, or the East Maui Volcano, is a massive, active shield volcano that forms more than 75% of the Hawaiian Island of Maui. The western 25% of the island is formed by another volcano, Mauna Kahalawai, also referred to as the West Maui Mountains.
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