Hawaii

  • Chasing Light in Haleakala National Park

    Bymichael

    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.

  • Storm Light in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes carry more personal history than others. Hawai’i is one of those for me — not one visit but several, each belonging to a different chapter. A honeymoon. A family trip with a daughter in her early teens, watching her see the islands for the first time. And then the final state of my 50 at 60 journey, the trip that closed a year of travel through all fifty states — a stay in Waikiki, the most visited corner of the most visited island, surrounded by everything that Hawaiian tourism has built around the experience of being there.