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Sierra Club Bulletin 



over the reef-like promontories of our mountain world, to be fol- 

 lowed speedily by inky darkness and a chilling temperature. The 

 roaring of the trade-winds outside only made more comfortable the 

 warm blankets on the iron bunk-beds. 



The crack of dawn found us astir next morning, for the most 

 strenuous and adventurous part of our program was before us. Our 

 goal that day was Kaupo, a place in the jungle on the southeastern 

 side of Maui, whither mail penetrated perhaps once a week if the 

 elements permitted. This meant a descent of two thousand feet into 

 the crater, a traverse of seven miles along the axis of greatest length, 

 emergence through the Kaupo Gap, and a long descent over ancient 

 lava flows — about nineteen miles of foot travel and a total descent 

 of eighty-six hundred feet. Through the half-open door I kept an 

 eye upon the reddening dawn, and when I judged the sun was about 

 to appear I stepped out. It was a wonderful spectacle. A sea of 

 clouds spread below us and all around. In a moment the sun 

 emerged above them and flooded them with golden glory. Down be- 

 low, in the chasm of the crater, unseen fingers were weaving strange 

 tapestries of color down the fire-baked sides of the crater precipices. 

 If this was the "House of the Sun," as some interpret the name 

 Haleakala, the sun was taking pains to adorn it. The silence of the 

 crater's depths seemed in strange contrast to the imaginable roar of 

 the volcanic forges that, according to most impressive evidence, had 

 in geologically recent times blown the mountain and the island asun- 

 der, opening for the lava two gigantic gateways to the sea. Great 

 fleecy clouds kept creeping up over the Koolau lava-fields into the 

 mouth of the Koolau Gap. But something turned them back at the 

 verge of the main crater. The chasm generates its own winds, and 

 some of them were beating back the intruders. 



The morning was still young when Wedberg turned back on the 

 home trail, while G. D. K. and I, with our canteens filled and our 

 packs adjusted, retraced two miles of our previous evening's scram- 

 ble along the rim of the crater to a point where a trail descends into 

 it. Immense slopes of loose, dry volcanic sand made the descent a 

 matter of sliding rather than walking. The cinder-cones are com- 

 posed of the same loose material, hanging at an angle of repose that 

 would enable a beetle to start an avalanche. Nevertheless, we clam- 

 bered to the top of one and found a funnel-form baby crater thirty 

 or more feet in depth. In some of these cinder-cone craters have 



