I have always wanted to go to Mars. Ever since I read Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles in the 5th grade I have had a great hankering for the Red Planet--the planet of mystery. The one most like ours in all the solar system. I imagine enigmatic, dramatic landscapes of red rock and craggy cliffs, rumpled ocher terrain, ancient cinder cones, silence.

I don’t know whether you’ve checked interplanetary fares lately, but a ticket to the moon costs more than I’ll make in a lifetime, and Mars is currently, in reality, out of range altogether. As least as far as hopping a NASA shuttle goes.

So, I go to the top of the island of Maui instead.

Have you been to the top of Haleakala volcano, to Haleakala National Park? Here’s a hint about what to expect: it’s not like anything you expect. It certainly wasn’t what I expected the first time I saw it in 1994. I was in love, I was living on the Big Island, and when we flew over to Maui, my sweetie and I, all I was really thinking about was whether this island had better restaurants and when I could get in the ocean (living at 4,000 ft. in wet, cold conditions inside the national park on the Big Island had me a little starved for sun, heat, and water that wasn’t falling on my head).

On our drive up the mountain through sugar cane fields (warm), orchid and protea farms (hmmm, kinda coolish up here) and high elevation shrublands (is the sweater in my bag back at the hostel?) I was more or less focused on the dropping temperatures and the fetching way the wind was blowing around the long chestnut locks of my boyfriend, and not so much on the changing landscape. Not good technique for someone who fancies herself an ecologist of sorts, I know, but I was in love at the time. You know how it is.

By the way, do you know that almost every plant you see growing below 7,000 feet in Hawaii is an exotic introduction? And did you realize that that is also true for 99% of the birds you will see and hear, excepting seabirds? And that no organism with four legs is native to any Hawaiian island? Yep, we’ve been doing a lot of ecological rearranging on this little island in the big Pacific. However, Haleakala National Park was established on Maui in 1916 because of its unique geological, biological and cultural aspects. When you visit the top three thousand feet of the island, you visit one of the last places where things look more or less like they looked on the day before any homo sapiens stepped foot on Maui’s shores. The only other place even remotely that unscrambled and unadulterated is the ocean around us. Sobering thought, yes?

Anyway, I know now that the drive up from sea level to the Haleakala National Park entrance at 7,000 feet takes you through at least seven and as many as 30 zones, climes, and microclimates. The steamy, sultry lowlands give way gradually to fields and meadows, forest and shrublands, and suddenly you are driving above the cloud deck. Here on Maui the cloud deck usually builds between 4,000 and 7,000ft., and as you coast up to the entrance fee station at the park you are quite often skating right out of the uppermost wisps of the cloud layer. I think I may have noticed this at the time, but I was probably digging madly for my sweater by that time or too in love to notice.

By the way, you generally lose three degrees Fahrenheit for every 1,000 feet you ascend up this mountain, and if you realize that the common daytime temps at sea level are in the low 80’s, you can do the math and figure out what it will be like at the 10,023 ft. summit. On the best of days.

At any rate, we blurred on up the mountain, car heater on and windows open, and the landscape gradually opened up and dried up. Shrublands became scrublands and even that bit of determined vegetation finally became red rock and soil, then red rock and cinder, and then we were at the summit visitor center parking lot. And still I didn’t realize we were on Mars, though the thin air made me feel weird and different (many of my good friends would testify that this has nothing to do with thin air).

There’s a photo of me draped festively over the railing near the overlook, but there’s no photo of my face when I looked over the overlook. Here is what I remember thinking, though: 1. This is not what I expected
2. There is nothing like this on the whole earth

The summit of Haleakala volcano is trenched out by the patient forces of erosion. From the overlook railing, you stand on the top of a roughly 3,000-foot drop. The red/orange/yellow ‘ground’ (cinder from eruption events, much of it) swoops and spreads down below you like a giant fan laid flattish. Cinder cones of varying heights and mineral colors march away from you through this massive trench, the clouds hug the mountain beneath you, the Big Island rides in the sky away to the SE like a lumpy big sister, and the arch of the blue sky seems like it’s about to park on your head. It is very, very quiet. Or can be, when the wind is light, which that day it was (I remember that, even though I was in love).

The crazy thing about this massive geological sand painting up there is that, because you’re on the very top of the island, you have nothing to use to get a sense of scale. Your mind goes bending this way and that, trying to decide if you’re seeing something the size of Texas or the size of your back yard. You can’t get it, really, unless you do some walking IN it. And then you realize that this otherworldly slice of Martian landscape is actually very, very roomy. It takes all day to walk the length of this S-shaped trench. It takes all day to walk down, across, and up it from side to side. It’s about 7 miles long by about 3 wide, but those dimensions don’t help you UNDERSTAND it. To understand it, you have to go see it, breathe it, take a walk in it.

Be warned—because the summit is at the top of the mountain it is the place where all possible weathers can run into each other at any time. It is as likely to be 60 degrees and clear, as it is to be 30 degrees and sleeting. It has snowed in June and it has been lovely and calm in January, if a tad nippy. Do as I somehow remembered to do, all those years ago: pack a sweater, and maybe even some raingear. Oh, and a camera so you can take your own railing-draping picture. Take food because there’s no food for sale in the park as there are ground-nesting birds—petrels and geese—that the park is hoping to protect and propagate. Food trash tends to call the rats, and the rats tend to eat the eggs. You get the connection. I bet you get it even if you’re in love and can’t think right now.

If you might be on Maui for a little while, more than a week or two, and you might want to check on volunteer opportunities in the park.

For you day-trippers: Haleakala Park is open year-round. Bring $20 for the 3-day entry pass (or bring your own National Parks Pass, if you remembered to pack it) and some snacks and water. Don’t go up hungry and don’t drink coffee beforehand. It will make you feel like light-headed crap, trust me on this one. Some people really feel the altitude and some don’t—monitor yourself and come down if you feel like your head or heart are about to explode. Day hikes are available (self-guided for the most part) and Park events are scheduled variably depending on the seasons. There’s a schedule for such things in the Visitor Center at 7,000 feet, just about a mile past the entrance fee station. Check the website for other info if you’ve got web access: www.nps.gov/hale

Otherwise, just fill the car up with gas as there’s no gas anywhere remotely near the park, and get going.

It’s the best Mars we’ve got on the Earth.

Aloha,

Judy*