Haleakala

Some landscapes exist in two completely separate registers and the transition between them is part of the experience. Haleakala National Park on Maui begins at sea level in the tropical warmth that defines the Hawaiian imagination — the ukulele and the plumeria and the particular quality of Pacific island air that is warm and salt-tinged and deeply specific to this archipelago. And then the road climbs. Past the pineapple fields and the upcountry ranches, through the cloud layer at 7,000 feet, above the clouds into the alpine zone at 9,000 feet, and finally to the summit of Haleakala at 10,023 feet — a dormant shield volcano whose summit crater is 2.5 miles wide and 2,100 feet deep and looks, on a clear morning above the cloud layer, like the surface of another planet.