The drive took about an hour and forty-five minutes. We passed through dramatic patches of wind and rain and clear along the way, followed by a very bright full moon. At one point, it was so misty and the moon was so bright that there was actually a rainbow --- or, I suppose, a moonbow --- cast in the raindrops by the light of moon, ghostly and drained of color against an ominously black backdrop.
We reached the park without incident, passing a few slowpokes along the way who couldn't handle the steep and windy mountain road. Our admission was still good from our visit to 'Ohe'o Gulch on Friday, so we went straight through. We arrived at the peak at around 5:45. It wasn't dark at all because of the bright moon, and the eastern sky was just starting to fade.
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| Full moon, bright enough to cast shadows |
The summit viewpoint was already quite crowded with cars and people when we got there, and it was extremely windy. And I mean extreme: The weather at the Retreat was 70 degrees and calm, and on the summit it was closer to 37 (yes, Farenheit!) with sustained winds of 35 miles per hour and gusts up to 50. There wasn't really any shelter, since the ranger station was already packed with people, so we huddled at the east-facing rail with the rest of the crowd, trying and generally failing to stay warm. Eventually, Michael and I found a few rocks to perch on just behind the wall of the ranger station, where the wind was blocked somewhat but where we could still get a clear view.
As we watched, the sky gradually blossomed with pink and orange, and then burst into fiery red. The cloud layer that we'd driven through to get to the peak was glowing like hot coals. When the sun finally did rise, the crowd let out a gasp as one --- it was an absolutely magical moment.
People started dispersing soon after the sunrise, about 6:30, so Michael and I were able to edge our way into the ranger station and find a spot to watch out of the windows, rather than continuing to freeze at the rail outside. The rising of the sun had done nothing to help the weather, and it was still very cold and windy.
Despite that, I was feeling up for a hike, wanting to explore the summit area a bit more. But Michael was tired from the drive and (perhaps wisely) didn't want to wander too much in the cold, thin air. But we agreed that it would be a shame to leave the summit without at least trying the beginning of the trail down, so we followed it for the first few hundred feet beyond the main parking lot.
If the clouds hadn't been there, I could have believed that we were on the moon.
The landscape was dotted with craters from the volcano, and there was nothing green or growing as far as the eye could see.
After twenty minutes or so of having sand blown in our eyes and losing feeling in our toes, we went back to the car and drove down through the clouds to the main ranger station, at a more manageable 7000 feet.
Outside the ranger station, they'd planted a small grove of endangered silversword plants, which grow only on this mountain and nowhere else in the world. They'd been decimated by human activity and but are currently being reintroduced slowly along the trails.
When I say this plant was silver, I mean it. Not "silver" because it's kind of gray or kind of blue or kind of reminds one of silver --- no, actually shiny silver, like it had been dipped in mercury. Amazing.
We'd settled on the short Hosmer Grove loop trail to explore the area, and though it wasn't quite the 10-hour summit-to-sea kind of excursion that I'd been hoping for, it was lovely and just the right length. We saw a few different kinds of honeyeaters along the way, and when we rounded the corner at the first lookout point, there was even a woman playing a ukulele to complement the birdsong.
After finishing the walk, we stripped off four or five layers of clothing and drove back to the cabin for lunch and a well-deserved nap. Then we decided to explore the grounds a bit, to make up for the missed hiking opportunities this morning. However, as previously noted, the map that they'd given us was completely hopeless as a guide: letters mixed with numbers in the key, some letters used more than once, some letters appearing on the map with no explanation, and nothing actually laid out on the map in any kind of spatial relation to where it actually was in real life, as far as I could tell. Seriously lacking in representational accuracy.
So we just gave up and walked around. With no help from the map, we managed the find the trail down to the ocean and decided to give it a go. It was much more rugged than we expected, but we kept egging ourselves on until we got to the beach. It was hard going there for a while, hanging onto ropes so as not to lose our footing, which more than made up for the fact that we hadn't done more than a quick nature walk this morning.
The beach itself was entirely rocks (well, some washed-up coconuts and driftwood too), but there were a few inviting pools at the foot of the waterfall as it spilled out into the ocean. We'll have to find some other time to come back and have a swim, since today it was threatening rain. We watched the surf for a while and then climbed back up.
Weird thing of the day #1: We'd picked up some pinot to have as a before-dinner drink, and it came with this wacky environmentally-friendly closure called a Zork:
Not the easiest thing to get off, but it basically guarantees the wine won't be corked. I somehow can't see it catching on, though.
Weird thing of the day #2: There was a set of Native American tarot cards called The Sacred Path in one of the drawers in the room (right next to the Ram Dass books and under the whalesong CDs), so I decided (after a few glasses of the pinot) to give myself a reading. Check it out:
I think it means that I'm going to go on a great journey and encounter the mysteries of the universe in order to restore my faith in my goals. Or something like that.
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