Back to nā mauna!

It had to wait a few weeks since arriving back on the island for me to sort out various things, but I've finally been back to visit Mauna Loa and Maunakea! The first weekend after I got my car I went for a drive up to 11,000 feet on Mauna Loa where I used to operate the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array. I didn't stick around at elevation very long (since just by driving to the Saddle I was already higher than the entirety of the continent of Australia), but now that I have an all-wheel drive SUV I felt (a bit more) comfortable about exploring some of the side roads off the main, paved access road. One of them—which I'm pretty sure goes to the NASA experiment where they put people in a simulated Mars camp for months at a time—was closed off, but I got a pretty neat photo of my car with Maunakea in the background.

I thought the colors worked really well in this shot. You can just see Maui in the background.

Then, this past weekend I took my new AWD capability for a spin up to the summit of Maunakea. Now, I've been up there probably a few dozen times as part of my volunteering and later working at the Visitor Information Station, but I honestly can't remember if I ever drove up there or not (as part of the guided summit tours, that is; I certainly never took my two-wheel drive car up there). If nothing else, this was certainly the first time I drove up there in my own personal vehicle with no demands on my time, and I found myself loving it. I felt a strange joy welling up upon arriving at the top and driving around the familiar telescopes that left me positively giddy, though that might've been the altitude, it's hard to say.

It was a beautiful day while we were up there.

I took along some fellow new coworkers from Gemini who moved here about a month after I arrived and haven't yet experienced the sights. It turns out we got up there just in time, as a mere two days later the summit was covered in snow and ice, and we've had a blizzard warning for the past few days (apparently Hawaii has now received more snow this season than Denver). We spent a few hours up there hiking to the physical summit and staying to watch the sunset, then leaving immediately afterwards because the wind came up an hour or so earlier and it got cold.

I always love seeing the shadow of the mauna projected on the sky like this at dusk.

I'm really glad I was able to get back to my two favorite volcanoes, even if just for relatively brief periods of time. Expect to see more photos in the future as I continue to settle in and reacquaint myself with some of the places I enjoyed visiting before. (There are a number of fellow Gemini employees new to the island, so I've got excuses for organizing day trips and hikes!) Now that I've got a GoPro, one of the creative projects I've wanted to do for literal years—making timelapse videos of some of these amazing hikes and experiences—is finally within my grasp, or at least it will be whenever my desktop computer finally gets here for doing the editing. In the meantime, you get these photos, and I get to enjoy the experiences anew. A hui hou!