Haleakala at Sunrise

The summit of Haleakala stands ten thousand and twenty-three feet above the Pacific. At that altitude, you are above the cloud layer for most of the year. The clouds sit below you, white and flat, and the sky above them is a shade of blue that does not exist at sea level. Before dawn, in the minutes before the sun clears the eastern horizon, the summit is cold enough to require a jacket in any season.

In Hawaiian tradition, Haleakala, the house of the sun, is the place where the demigod Maui lassoed the sun with a rope of braided coconut fiber. The sun had been moving too quickly across the sky, giving his mother too little daylight to dry her kapa cloth. Maui lassoed it from this summit and held it until the sun agreed to move more slowly. The legend encodes an observation: from Haleakala's summit, the sun does appear to move differently. The horizon is far enough below you that the sunrise comes earlier and the sunset later than at sea level. You have, in a sense, stretched the day.

The summit is also an active astronomical observatory site, chosen for the same reasons that make Mauna Kea attractive: altitude above the cloud layer, dark skies, stable air. The Air Force Research Laboratory operates facilities there. The sunrise that draws several hundred cars to the summit every clear morning has been occurring there since before any of those facilities existed, watched first by Hawaiians who understood it as a sacred event, then by astronomers who measured it, then by tourists who drove up in the dark and waited in the cold for it.