One area of Maui that we had yet to visit was Makawao State Forest Reserve, so we decided to spend Chris’ last full day exploring here. Makawao is in the “upcountry”, the farming and ranching region strung out north-to-south along Haleakala’s western slopes, lying on the northwest shoulder of the volcano. The landscape is…
On our way back down from the summit of Haleakala, we decided to stop just prior to exiting the national park and walk the short but remarkable Hosmer Grove nature trail. There is a campground here as well as the park headquarters, but the main attraction is a unique alien forest, meaning that the…
After returning from our short hike down the Halemauu trail, we drove up to the top of Haleakala once again, not really because we wanted to go there a third time but because we wanted to check out the short overlook trails along the west rim, the uppermost one of which can only be…
We went out for dinner after Mass on Saturday night, discussing a wild hair idea to revisist Haleakala early Sunday morning – we were hoping to catch the north side of the mountain without cloud cover so we could see the views we had missed when completing our hike through the crater in a…
The West Maui mountains are some of the wettest places on earth, receiving over 400 inches of rain each year. Throughout our trip, we had looked at the rugged peaks maintain an almost constant cloud cover that typically obscured the tops of all but the lowest ridges. Another hike we had wanted to do…
After the easy walk at Iao Valley, we returned to Kihei a little dissatisfied, so, after some lazy time at the condo, we headed back out to walk the other paved trail on our list: the Wailea Boardwalk. Beginning at the south end of Kihei Town, the walk begins with a short stretch of…
One of the places we had wanted to take the boys in their double stroller was the Iao Valley, which we knew had some paved trails – the area is famous for the Iao Needle, a lava pinnacle that towers over the valley just west of Kahului and Wailuku. Well, we never made it…
The kids all left today – it was super that they were able to come for 10 whole days, and we missed them as soon as we left the airport. After doing some errands on the way back to the condo, we decided to walk later in the evening and catch the sunset from somewhere…
It was Jane’s birthday today, so the girls decided to take her out for a mani-pedi after all the kids went snorkeling in the morning and we babysat. We had wanted to hike to Lahaina-Pali trail ever since starting to plan our Maui vacation, so we decided to squeeze it into the already-full day…
The kids were all busy with their various activities this afternoon, so we drove out north of Wailuku to check out some trails on our list. One, the Waihee Valley trail, requires users to get a permit from the current landholder (we’ve since discovered that hiking on this trail has been completely disallowed, unfortunately),…