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