Reflections on Desolation Valley and other parts of Maui

In my misspent youth, when I read comic books, I came across a joke that middle age is when it takes you longer to get over a good time than it took you to have it. A joke like that is wasted on the young. And sometimes it's also wasted on the old. This week it took me three days to fully recover from my eight-hour jaunt into Haleakala's crater. I really don’t remember growing older.

Why was it so damned difficult? A month earlier I walked more than a half-marathon – 14.3 miles, gaining 1,500 feet of elevation and packing a 20-pound weight vest. And I maintained a speed of 3 miles per hour. On Tuesday I hiked 11.2 miles and averaged about 1.4 miles per hour packing 30 pounds (mostly the bare essentials for survival to prepare for the unlikely possibility of a freak winter storm). The statistics don’t tell the whole story – coming back from the valley probably took six of those eight hours. Most of the last half of the hike required trekking poles. That slope was so gradual--why would I need trekking poles?

Well, OK, silly me. The half-marathon took place on Seattle’s Madison Street corridor, walking back and forth between Alaskan Way and Lake Washington and the highest elevation is under 450 feet. Hiking Haleakala involved descending 2,400 feet from an initial elevation of 9,740 feet and then using the last half of the hike to climb out of that hole – with all the eight hours of hiking taking place at more than 7,300 feet. Even descending was a slog.

Well, Duh! Not only does less oxygen make you more exhausted, it also makes you stupid. For example, it took me three days to figure out the obvious. Now that I think about it, I done good.

Maui is more of an organism than a paradise. It encompasses a set of systems that are vital and dynamic. (Maybe vital and dynamic are the same thing.)

Little shards are just itchin' to chip off this rock.

Take a look at this rock, for example. There are rocks like this over the entire island – iron-rich rocks that were full of compressed gas before the volcano tossed them out. The gas expanded and the rocks cooled, creating lapidary filigree just itchin’ to disintegrate as moisture, the sun’s heat and oxygen converted its iron atoms to rust. The sand in Haleakala was not like grains of worn silica, but more like soft shards that you don’t want your bare feet to get too acquainted with.

In many places Maui is composed of jagged, pocked, bubbleacious igneous rocks that will crumble when put to the test. In kind of a nice way, you can think of it as a rotten little island.

Imagine the fillings in your teeth. You drink warm liquids and the enamel and the fillings expand, but not quite at the same rate. Then you drink something icy and they contract, but not precisely at the same rate. That’s why fillings loosen up in a few years. That’s why Maui’s rocks become earth over time.

The "needle" in Iao Valley of West Maui. If you're a rope-up kind of a person, don't bet your life on the integrity of the rocks.

On a larger scale, imagine climbing “the needle” in the Iao Valley of West Maui. Imagine, but don’t try it. The cliffs there aren’t meant for scaling. They are too intent on becoming earth.

And it has its own special idiosyncracies. Like the bicyclists I passed on the way to the crater. They were peddling virtually from sea level to 10,000 feet in a single ride. Without trekking poles! Like a snake, the road curved, banked and twisted up the mountain, helping as much as possible to navigate those places where shoulders were replaced by drop-offs. It is made for a sports car, until you go over an edge and land on those rocks.

A mild example of Haleakala's curvacious highway.

 There’s an elevation where all of a sudden I came across some of the biggest aloe vera plants I’ve ever laid eyes on. They seemed to be situated just at a particular elevation up the mountain. As I climbed, the nature of the trees changed, and then there weren’t any.

Steam rose from the valley, likely carried by updrafts to places where the air was dry enough that it ate the steam. (At elevation, the air can be really dry, and that contributes to dehydration, one of the serious considerations for high-altitude hiking. You breathe out your moisture, but don’t breathe moisture back in.) On my last drive down, you couldn’t see the lowlands because of a cloud bank that surrounded the mountain like a coral atoll.  But I don’t remember driving through it.

Clouds around the old gal's hips, but clear air at the top.

Here are a couple of photos that might remind you what hikers face in that crater:

This is just a little way down from the top. It was about here that I saw a bride hiking back up in a frilly dress and her groom in a suit. What a place for a wedding photo.

It doesn't show in the photo, but these folks were walking reeeeaaaaallly slowly.

Here’s where I think the clouds come from:

About 40 miles from the crater, a steady sea breeze insistently nuzzles the coconut palms and wafts moisture to the highlands.

You don’t see any clouds here, because the air is warm and has a lot of carrying capacity, but every 1,000 feet of elevation gain is about 4 degrees cooler on a clear day, so by the time you go up 6,000 feet, the temperature has dropped 24 degrees and the moisture can become mist.

And there’s plenty of wind to carry that moisture inland. Check out these wind and kite surfers:

You can't see his kite, but the tautness of those lines display the wind's power. . .

. . . as does this leap, which takes him at least eight feet above his wake.

Without lines to tangle, wind surfers can team up.

Here's a few more shots, just to wind up my final dispatch for Maui and Haleakala:

For reasons that should be obvious, I call this milestone on the Sliding Sands Trail "Turkey Rock."

The Ahinahina (also called "Silversword") thrives in the god-forsaken, windblown dry environment of Haleakala. It probably is descended from the California tarweed, and over a few millions of years had the good sense to evolve. But even though it can live up to 50 years, it never learned the dangers of unprotected sex. It gets laid just once in its life,  and then dies, scattering up to 50,000 seeds that are dispersed by the winds that buffet the mountain. Let that be a lesson to you.

Ah, it's great to be young and pretty. You can shoot a selfie instead of doing the heavy lifting by hiking down into the crater.

My final view of West Maui, from the airport.

Here's a tip of my hat to Diana, the acquaintance who operates the palatial Baker B&B where I holed up for 10 days while visiting Maui. This is what she has to endure every day.

Love,
Robert,
and Wilson

Haleakala: You might as well be walking on the moon

Haleakala moonscape, Maui, Jan 27

At one time or another many of you may have heard the song by Smash Mouth, which has the unforgettable phrase, "you might as well be walking on the sun."

Well, for Wilson and Me, hiking 2,400 feet down into the maw of Haleakala, and then back out again. was somewhat like walking on the moon -- visually, at least. And I couldn't have done it without doping.

Fortunately, it was winter Tuesday. If it had been summer, I don't think I would have made it back, even with the dope. A couple months ago, in Costa Rica, at 11,000 feet, I felt dizzy. So this time I came prepared for one of Hawaii's tallest volcanoes. I brought altitude medications prescribed by Group Health. I am an unabashed doper.

 Coincident to my visit, I ran into old friends from Peru, Lynn and Chuck Morrison. Chuck is a doctor who takes public service health vacations, which is how we met almost four years ago. He is on contract in Maui, and when we had dinner together, he explained that altitude medication acidifies your blood and helps it deliver more oxygen. It seems to have worked.

But enough talk.Here's the photos to tell the tale:

At the top of the volcano, observatories take advantage of the frequently clear skies.

Right from the start, the Haleakala crater showed its otherworldly appearance.

In the distance, the destination lay before us. That crater floor is miles away.

Part way down we ran into a zone where Silverswords, one of Haleakala's unique plants, flourish--tenuously.Wilson took a moment to get acquainted.

Split rocks marked the halfway point for the 11.2 mile hike. We had descended 1,200 feet from a starting point of 9,740 feet. The rocks are in the foreground. That very tiny speck in the center of the photo that appears to be next to the rock is actually someone a bit farther down the trail, maybe a half mile away.

Shade: Time to stop for lunch and gaze at the peak on the opposite side of the volcano.

In the crack of the shade  rock, a plant found the moisture to grow and survive.

Wilson met people along the way. Ellen Ritt from Denver used him to give a ride to her traveling companions: Gumby and Pokey.

Wind appears to have carved this gully, which was part of the pathway down.

The dark patches are not shadows, but seeps, proving that the moon has water.

That's a dune of some sort--an enormous dune.

The horse-hitching post marked my destination and turnaround point. I call the bush facing it George W. It wasn't skill or good genes that allowed it to thrive. It was just dumb luck that it took root there.

This photo proves that Wilson made it to the floor of the crater.

A solitary Silversword looks fat and happy among a field of rocks.

This glance backward provides a reminder of where we had been and what we accomplished.

6 p.m. The sun is close to setting, the crater rim is only a few hundred feet away, and I had water to spare.

It was an exhausting day. When I got back to my lodging all I wanted to do was bathe and sleep. Thanks for coming along.

Love,
Robert
And Wilson

The Super Hero gets the heebie-geebies

At this writing, I have my hands full. Wilson has turned into a Nervous Nelly and is having second thoughts about coming along when I hike the crest of Haleakala, the volcano that rose from the Pacific to become the beautiful island of Maui.It's time for a geology lesson.

30,000-foot volcano
If it was about heights, I could possibly understand the fear. The mountain rises 10,023 feet above the sea. But it's bigger than that. It actually rises 30,000 feet above the ocean floor. It is the largest dormant volcano in the world. It is so big that it actually bends down the earth's crust at the rate of about 0.12 inches a year.

From Kehei, it's hard to appreciate that Haleakala, in background, rises 10,000 feet above sea level.

 But that's not why Wilson is anxious. It's the fire thing.

OK, I got it: Wilson's a super hero who can make an estimated 30 children happy just by being there. Wilson can be stabbed with a knife, punctured by a lion and run over by a Mack truck and just keep bouncing.

But every super hero has a weakness. For Bruce Willis in the movie, Unbreakable, it was water. With Superman, it's kryptonite. And with Wilson, it's fire. And volcanoes are created by fire. It ain't the size of Haleakala that worries Wilson. It's all that fire.

Anyway, it's up to me to explain to Wilson why this isn't a problem, and why Haleakala isn't going to turn into some great big Mount St. Helens. And the answer is--SIAL.

The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble...
SIAL is geologic speak for silica and aluminum. two of the earth's lighter, and very abundant, elements. Silica is brittle, translucent and non-conducting. You can use it for electrical insulation. You can turn it into glass. Aluminum is malleable, opaque and a conductor of electricity. The two are almost identical, despite their obvious differences on the grand scale. There's a real surprise waiting for you on the atomic scale: The real difference between aluminum and silica that creates the big difference which we experience is actually very, very tiny--one electron and one proton. Wow.

Aluminum, far left, and silica, center, are very light and almost identical in structure. (Black circles are electrons. P=Proton. N=Neutron. Note that Iron has about twice as many protons, electrons and neutrons.

I'm reminded of a song: What a difference a proton makes....la, la, la...

Silica and aluminum are the pond scum of the earth. They are light, and they float to the top of the world.  If you live in Kansas, or Seattle, or Texas, or Paris, or Italy, you walk on silica and aluminum--which, by  the way,  are the primary components of clay, too. Truly, continental mountains are only made of clay (but our love is here to stay). Wear them down to their tiniest particles and you end up with the gooey substance that  you can mold into shapes and then fire to produce bowls and flower pots and beer mugs and cool things like that. A lot of the first written symbols were scratched into clay shards, helping to accelerate the advance of civilization.

Anyway, the fact that the continents have so much silica in them is the reason that continental volcanoes blow up while Hawaiian volcanoes sputter, boil and flow, but  otherwise don't cause a lot of trouble--uh, by comparison, anyway.

Hawaiian volcanoes are only about half silica and have a whole lot of iron in them. Their magma flows when it's hot and gets dark when it cool. When continental rocks melt from volcanism, roughly 75 percent of their magma is silica. Silica doesn't flow. It's really thick, even when hot. It's like tar.
 You can see what it's like when you watch someone blowing glass. Just imagine that sticky, viscous hot liquid trapped under pressure and imagine the pressure suddenly being released. Blowie, you have stuff flying everywhere. Just like ol' Mount St. Helens.

So anyway, Hawaii's volcanoes are rich in iron, and they don't build up a big head of steam and then let fly, like St. Helens did.

The Red Dirt Shirt
By the way, all that iron helps explain why tourists to Hawaii can purchase the Red Dirt Shirt. The soil on one of the oldest islands, Kauai, is particularly weathered and rusty red, and T-shirt companies make a killing making a muddy mess out of the local earth, and then indelibly staining shirts in the dirty red water. Then tourists pay them for the stained shirts and take a little bit of Hawaii home with them.

I put Wilson in my own Red Dirt Shirt for a few moments as it was drying with the rest of the laundry. That's Wilson, below, peeking out through the neck hole.

Wilson tries on the Red Dirt Shirt. Hawaii's iron-rich islands have eroded over millennia, and the iron in the rock that makes for "friendlier" volcanoes also creates a rusty-red soil which can be used to die T-shirts.

OK. So Wilson doesn't have to worry too much about an eruption. But that doesn't make climbing Haleakala any easier. Haleakala is a "shield" volcano. That means it looks like a shield that was laid on the ground. (You saw that in the photo at the top of this dispatch.) It rises very slowly. It won't be like climbing Mount Adams or Rainier, or any of the cascade volcanoes. It takes an awfully long walk to get to the top. So I ain't doing that.

What I'm looking at is driving Wilson up to the national park headquarters and then hiking from there to the summit. The summit is several thousand feet higher than where I am right now, so it's going to be a lot cooler. (Figure 4-5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler on a clear day for every thousand feet of elevation gained.)

Or maybe we'll drive to the summit and then go on one of those really long hikes at elevation.
I'm still figuring this out. But at least by explaining this, I've kind of calmed Wilson down a bit.
There will be more to share later.

Love,

Robert,
and Wilson.

A government map giving a three-dimentional view of Maui. Haleakala accounts for the big section of the island.

Hiking the sleepy inferno on Maui

Kihei, Maui, Hawaii
As Wilson and I prepare to do some hiking on Haleakala, Maui's inactive 10,000 foot volcano, I have to post the question that has always puzzled me:

What was David Johnson Thinking? What in the hell possessed him to sit in front of a ticking time bomb?

We know what he said. We know what his last words were: "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"

Well, yeah. "It" was the collapse of the bulging side of Mount St. Helens and a stone wind traveling nearly at the speed of sound directly at him. No-one to date has found his remains. They've found evidence of his camp site, but like the Kingston Trio song goes, "he's the man who never returned."

How could a professional geologist with a keen interest in volcanoes have been so unprepared?
A single five-hour geology class that included a section on vulcanism would have been sufficient to clarify the folly of Johnson and other geologists who were pleased as punch to be hanging around an explosive mountain.

30,000 deaths
At the time, I well remembered the story of Mount Pelée, the stratovolcano located in the northern end of Martinique, an island in the Lesser Antilles arc of the Caribbean. In 1902, it became the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century, killing 30,000 people, most by pycroclasti (a boiling flow of hot ash and gasses called a nuée ardente) when it pushed a cinder cone up through its vent. The picture below shows the cone that scooted up to the top of the vent. For years afterward, until it wore away, it stood like a giant gravestone to commemorate its wrath.

The cone of Mount Pelée

 The cone trapped what was below in the vent and grudgingly released and directed its nuée ardente right down the hillside, directly at the largest city on the island, Saint-Pierre. Rum casks on the dock exploded and the liquor flowed in the harbor, creating a sheet of fire. Boats  were incinerated. Two people got out alive from the area below the volcano. One of them was a man who had the good fortune of being imprisoned in a dungeon below ground, yet he still was badly burned. Here's the Wikipedia report on  Pelée:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pel%C3%A9e

Third house under the mountain
My friends, the Satterstroms, had a cabin at Mount St.  Helens. It was the third house from the mountain. Now it is the third house under the mountain, or somewhere. They were among a core of people who imagined going into the volcanic zone to retrieve their belongings. Before they took that trip, I shared with Fred an illustration from the Seattle Times showing how the mountain was bulging. "You don't want to go there," I told him. But a whole bunch of people did go there on the weekend the mountain blew. They got in and most got out on Saturday. Then, at 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 1980, St. Helens let loose, spilling her guts down the mountainside, and blasting ash and fire sideways and straight up, distributing the ash in immense quantities across Washington State. Not since The Cruxifiction had the skies grown darker and more foreboding.

Dodging the bullet
Winston Churchill once talked about the exhilarating feeling of hearing a bullet whistle past your ear and knowing you are still alive. It took millions of years for mountains like St. Helens to rise. Set against that immense time span you have the space of one day in which people entered the zone and retrieved their belongings. That is a tiny fraction of an instant in geologic time. You wonder:  Do the people who made it out feel the exhilaration of having heard the bullet and knowing they are still alive?

What David Johnson had to know was that oceanic volcanos like those which formed the Hawaiian Islands, gurgle and flow. But continental volcanos tend toward the explosive, Mount Pelée type. And there was plenty of evidence that Mount St. Helens was a Peléen nightmare waiting to wake up.

So why did David Johnson stick around?  In some accounts,he is depicted as a soldier who didn't abandon his picket line. By these accounts, he knew the danger, but he also knew that he wasn't the only person in danger. He faced it, monitored the mountain, and was partly responsible for the fact that dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of others  didn't die with him, because he had communicated just how dangerous this fascinating mountain was. That leaves open the question as to whether journalists in the established news media were just a little too greedy about the story and just a little too lazy to do the research to properly warn the public. Would that estranged husband have gone there with his two sons if he had any idea of the potential consequences? There are people whose lives were snuffed out who might have stayed out of harm's way, if the media had more thoroughly and vigorously exposed the danger.

But why the danger? Why the difference between continental and oceanic volcanoes? Why do some gurgle and others explode?

As Wilson and I begin preparing for our hike on Haleakala--the volcano that created Maui--I'll be discussing that, in the next dispatch.

Meanwhile, here's some photos relating to Pelée: https://www.google.com/search?q=mount+pelee+1902&newwindow=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=eOG_VJ_QDcaxogS90oH4Bg&ved=0CDQQ7Ak&biw=1280&bih=663

Love,
Robert,
And  Wilson

Saint-Pierre in the 1880s, with Mount Pelée in the background.

Bladder Problems on the First Hike of 2015

Hi,

As most of you know, my name is Robert Smith
People call me Robert Smith

Today, for no particular reason, I decided to go on a hike.

This being the first hike of the year, I thought I'd bring along Wilson, my indestructible soccer ball hiking buddy.

So I loaded up my good luck 20-pound weight vest, which I always wear on hikes, and then I put on my new  Asolo hiking boots --the ones I got mail order from Sierra Trading Post?  Then me and Wilson drove to North Bend, where there's this mountain, Little Si. I wasn't feeling like taking on any great big hike today, but the sky was clear and you could see Big Si, plain as day. It looked beautiful. No snow or nothing like that.

So, for no particular reason, I drove over to Big Si, parked the car, put on my backpack and me and Wilson began walkin'. It was real comfortable at first. Those Asolo hiking boots could take me just about anywhere.

It wasn't more than a mile before I began to feel real tired. Then I realized it was a bladder problem. So I stopped on the trail and drained my bladder.  The picture below is the place on the trail where I made water from my bladder. That made it a little easier to hike.

I drained my bladder where there was a bunch of pine needles and stuff so the trail would't get real muddy for other folks.

When I was done, I felt 10 pounds lighter. And my backpack actually was 10 pounds lighter, because there was more than a gallon of water in that bladder. It was one of those mail-order foldable plastic bladders you can get on Amazon? Fits right in the backpack and it's great for adding weight when you are training for a big hike like the one I'm doing on Mount Adams next summer.

Wilson and I rested on a bench at a place called Snag Flats, which survived a forest fire in 1910.

The boardwalk at Snag Flats. Many trees survived the 1910 fire.

Wilson and I met some real nice people on the trail. There were were two lady hikers and one of then had climbed all the way up to 21,000 feet near a mountain they call Everett or something like that. While she was telling me about gettin' splitting headaches from being so high up another guy came along who have been hiking in the same area and they had a nice chat.

Some people asked me about Wilson. One of them was this cute Asian-looking girl with a real gentle voice and a nice smile. She was from Hawaii.

She told me her name was Moa -- I think that's a really pretty name. I asked her whether she was part Hawaiian and she said, no, she's 100 percent Korean. She told me she was from Oahu, where her folks still live, and I  told her how I'm going to Maui later this month to hike Haleakala, this great big volcano. But don't worry, it's stupid, or dormant or something, and it hasn't gone off for a long time.

There was also this guy who was hiking with a little bitty baby on his back and another couple that asked me about Wilson, just like Moa did. I told them all about how Wilson was indestructible, except in fire, and how little kids on refugee camps can't keep a ball inflated for long, but that Wilson doesn't deflate and how I'm hiking to raise money to send Wilson's brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts all over the world.

Oh, and by the way, people have bought four more Wilsons in my campaign just recently, and if you're one of them and you're reading this, I want you to know that I sure appreciate it.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Anyway, I was able to get to the 2 mile mark and climb 1,500 feet before I realized I was pretty tired, and it was time to go home.

So, for no particular reason, I turned  around and headed home. I had only gone half-way up Mount Si, but that's OK, because I hadn't intended to climb it today anyway.

I'm tired now. But I'm going back to Si on Saturday and this time I hope to get to the top. I'll leave my weight vest at home, but I'll bring my backpack with the bladder. The backpack is necessary because it gets really cold on Mount Si this time of year and you'd have to be stupid not to take your 10 essentials.

Like Momma always said--stupid is as stupid does.

Love

Robert
Robert Smith,
And Wilson

The bark on this great big old tree was so thick that fire couldn't hurt it.