Life up here is found nowhere else. The silversword — ʻāhinahina — grows only on Haleakalā’s high slopes, waits as long as half a century to bloom once, and then dies; the nēnē, Hawaiʻi’s native goose, walks the cinder like it owns the place; and down at Hosmer Grove the native honeycreepers still flash through the trees. The park protects more endangered species than almost any other in the national park system.
On August 1, 1916, Haleakalā was set aside as part of Hawaiʻi National Park, and the modern era of the mountain began: Civilian Conservation Corps crews built the great crater trails in the 1930s — Keoneheʻeheʻe, the Sliding Sands, and Halemauʻu switchbacking down the wall — and on July 1, 1961, Haleakalā became a national park in its own right. The crater district joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, the park was named an International Biosphere Reserve in 1980, and its summit sky remains one of the darkest and clearest anywhere — which is why the stargazing is famous and the sunrise is a pilgrimage.
Why People Visit Haleakalā
Haleakalā offers a different Hawaiʻi — above the clouds, where the air is thin, the silence carries, and the sun rises over an ocean of mist at six in the morning. Travelers come for the sunrise at Puʻu ʻUlaʻula, the silversword on the upper slopes, the long hike down into the crater on Sliding Sands, the bamboo-forest walk to Waimoku Falls at Kīpahulu, the Pools of ʻOheʻo cascading down to the sea, and the dark-sky stargazing from the summit at night. It is contemplative, otherworldly, and unforgettable — a sacred mountain that has been holding sky over east Hawaiʻi for as long as anyone has counted.
