Conquering Mauna Loa Summit...

Whew.  It's been a while since I last visited the blog-o-sphere.  As many of you know, I left Hawaii for Australia, but I have now landed back in the good ole' NKY.  The last 6 weeks have been a whirlwind.  But the blog isn't over.  I still have 5 or 6 Hawaii blog posts to do, and I've now been requested to do a few on my trip to Aussie land too.  So maybe I'll get around to that too.

In the world of my blog, I'm still backpacking around Volcano's national park on Hawai'i Island.
On the previous blog post, Conquering Mauna Kea Summit, I was atop the world's largest mountain (if you include the distance it rises from the sea floor).  Mauna Kea is almost 14,000 feet above sea level.  In this blog I'm hiking up Mauna Loa, which is only about 100 feet shorter than Mauna Kea.  In the picture to the right you can see where I camped prior to my hike up Mauna Loa.  The spot to park on the backside of the volcano is at 11,000 feet and I stayed there to get adjusted to the altitude.  I was joined by Matt and Ben, who were from England and California, respectively.  In the picture you can see Mauna Kea rising out of the clouds in the distance.

In the below picture, you can see Mauna Loa's only observatory in the upper left corner over my car.  I'm ready to go after packing up camp, so here's a pre-adventure picture.  Despite being 5-something in the morning, it's really bright, and it's also cold.  It was in the upper 30's/lower 40's at the start of my hike.  I'm probably smiling because the day is going according to plan, but that will soon change...

Sunrise at camp; 11,000 feet

The above picture shows the beautiful sunrise at 11,000 feet.  I only got about 4 hours of sleep before God turned the sun on, and I still had a mild headache from my prolonged time at altitude, but a silly little headache wasn't about to stop my 3,000 ft upward climb.

The picture below shows the surface I started walking on.  I found this huge drum in the middle of no where, which made for a good picture.  Hualalai lurks in the background, an 8,200 ft volcano.  It's actually really massive, but becomes dwarfed by its neighbors: Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea .

There was a 15-20% chance of severe hail and high altitude storms for the day.  The sky looks fine, but at 10,000+ feet the circumstances can change in an instance.  I had made the park rangers moderately annoyed since I was going by myself, and because I was trying to summit the volcano in one day from the North side.  I convinced them I could do it even though they said it's rare for people to accomplish it in one day (and they went on and on about some sort of safety concerns, blah, blah, blah...).  Typically people take a whole day to get up to the caldera's edge, then camp, and on the second day they summit and come back down.  I said, "ridiculous-ness" and professed my superior abilities to conquer this mountain.  They said they'd keep track of my progress by monitoring my car, which was their way of saying that if my car was still there more than 24 hours after my scheduled completion of the trail then they'd notify emergency services.  So my pack was filled with 5 L of water, 12 cliff bars, beef jerky, but mostly it held supplies for poor weather and/or emergencies.

I was grateful for my hood (for the unrelenting sun) and gloves (to battle the temperature).  ...and yes, this picture took multiple tries.

So I was supposed to be following Ahu for the trail, which is a fancy term for piled rocks, but I didn't see any so I just followed this little service trail.  I figured the trail would end where the Ahu started.  That makes sense, right?  Wrong!  Five minutes after I took the picture above, I realized I was completely lost when the trail just did a small loop back to itself.  Several concerns now surfaced: I was officially lost with no trail; I was 1.5 hours into the day with no time to spare; I'm on a dangerous hike.  Also, I had close to a zero chance of getting a cell phone signal for emergency help if I needed it.  

So back to the point of me being lost: I considered turning back and finding the trail, but I had probably missed it 1.5 hours earlier which would mean that I was then 3 hours short of the day.  I didn't have time for that if I was going to summit this volcano in a day, so I decided that realistically I can't be lost.  I knew the geographical direction of the trail compared to my supposed direction I had been traveling.  I mean, all I'm doing is climbing to the top of a Volcano, right?  There's only one direction to go to get to the top: up!  So, I figured I might as well just climb towards the summit.  So that's what I decided to do.  Since my visual points on the horizon were practically the same as when I started (ie. Hualalai and Mauna Kea) I was able to surmise my actual direction with my compass. my compass.  I was also confident that I could have easily made it back to camp at any point in time if the weather turned south once I was wondering the volcano's hillside without a trail.  So I decided to be a man and tell myself that I was obviously NOT lost...just making my own adventure.  Well, it made me feel better anyway.  In the back of my head was the ranger's warnings constantly on repeat, which suddenly seemed to make more sense...darn them for being right!

Two hours later I'm still climbing without a trail following a general compass direction toward the top, but I was also gradually crossing the mountain to where I figured the actual trial was.  I figured out why Mauna Loa means long mountain in Hawaiian, because you just keep climbing and you never see the top: going over top one ridge just allows you a view of another ridge a mile later.  I had my telephono lens on my camera so I could scan the distance frequently.  Altitude sickness always seemed to be just a moment away, and I was mildly concerned that if something happened the rangers wouldn't even be looking for me in the correct place since I was so far off course.  Oops - situations like this is probably why you are not supposed to hike dangerous areas alone.  After many Hail Mary's, Our Father's and possibly some bargaining with God on what I'd be willing to do in exchange for finding the trail safely, I  finally spotted a post about a mile away - it was a trail marker!  Whew.  Back on track!  Thanks Big Guy upstairs (oh, and You know I was just kidding about my willingness to be a priest when I was bargaining with You, right?).  I digress...

Now I could relax a little more.  I had been stopping every 100' or so earlier, not merely to scan the horizon, but also because of the altitude.  The air sure was thin.  Traveling over rough terrain with 35 pounds on my back at high altitude is a chore.  I found it difficult to stay positive at times.  I had to keep reminding myself that I do, in fact, run marathons, and that I was fine despite all the symptoms I was experiencing from mild altitude sickness.  I think the negativity was produced by the compounding of several symptoms I was experiencing: thin oxygen/shortness of breath, frequent pounding headache, racing heart rate, a heavy pack and the challenging terrain.  All of these were making me irritable and frustrated, plus the annoyance of being lost earlier (as I just listed all my symptoms it suddenly makes me wonder why I do crazy things such as this?).  I was back on track and I was trying to squash these negative attributes that were occurring.  Anytime I needed a break (which was often since I constantly felt like a fat man that had never run 10 ft in his entire life) all I had to do was turn around since Mauna Kea was always a beautiful site in the distance.  Mauna Kea was always visible since Mauna Loa is such a gradual slope and I was already above the tree line.  It was views like this that started to remind me the real reason I do this.  It's all a matter of perspective, which is a good phrase to remember about a lot of things in life.

Mauna Kea always watched my back.

Ah-ha! There's those darn Ahu I was supposed to be following! (picture below)

In the picture above, the trail finally started to flatten out, so I knew I had to be getting close.  I was now 7 hours in.  The above picture is one of my favorites.  Despite being volcanic rock from the same volcano, the various colors present in the rock were fascinating.  One side of the trail had extremely rough terrain with vibrant red colors in the rock, while the opposed side had fractured pure-black volcanic rock.  Meanwhile I was walking on, what appeared to be, gold colored flakes.  It was awesome.

After 8 hours I finally made it to the edge of summit's caldera.  It was amazing.  So incredibly vast.  To get the entire caldera into one picture I had to take 4 pictures and then stitch them together.  It appeared as though the lava had just cooled days ago instead versus 30 years ago.  I can only imagine what it looked like as an actual lake of hot lava.  Fun facts (nerd alert): Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984 but it was a mild erruption.  The 1926 and 1950 eruptions were larger and each destroyed several villages.

In the next two pictures you can see the cooled lava within the caldera.  You can also see the true summit of Mauna Loa a mile away in the distance.

The summit, in the above picture, was my true destination.  Despite being a mile away across the lava lake, it was still a 3.5 mile hike around the caldera's edge in order to get to the true summit, which was 300 ft higher than my current vantage point.  I was conflicted about the idea of continuing my journey to the summit, so I started the remaining hike around the edge while I thought about it.  Life was much better now since I was walking mostly on level ground so my headache and high heart rate had calmed quite a bit.  After a mile I noticed the clouds were becoming numerous in the area I had to hike back down, both low level and high level clouds.  In the picture below you can see that the clouds have formulated at 13,000+ ft instead of being at 8,000 ft where they were an hour ago.  Many were looking a bit ominous too.  I really didn't want to spend the night in a lava tube (cave) under severe weather conditions, so I decided to start my journey back to the base area.  Luckily, it was smooth sailing back down.  I was pleased to notice my headache disappear after 10 minutes, and a sub-max, but constant, pace kept my heart rate low.  All, I had to do was beat the weather.  On the way back down I did have some mild rain and intermittent high gusts of winds, but overall it was fine.  Sure enough those piles of rocks led me all the way back to my car!  Turns out, I literally missed them within the first 5 minutes of the start of my hike earlier in the day.

Lava tube/cave

Mahalo for visiting.  A hui hou.

*Sorry if some of the pictures are a bit too grainy.  I typically decrease the quality of the pictures to help with uploading them, but this time I think I decreased the quality too much in some of them.