Haleakalā National Park United States

Legendary

The now dormant volcano is popular destination for beautiful sunrises.

Photo by Navin Rajagopalan

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In 1962, a group of Maui Boy Scouts strapped boxes to their backs and hiked nearly ten miles into the crater. Inside the boxes were geese.

The nēnē, Hawaii's state bird, had been wiped out on Maui by the 1890s. Those birds were part of a plan to bring them back.

It worked. Around 500 nēnē were released here between 1962 and the late 1970s, and roughly 250 to 350 live in the park today.

The park sits on the island of Maui, built around the enormous volcano called Haleakalā. The name means "House of the Sun."

Most people call the huge basin at the summit a crater, but it isn't really one. It's a valley carved out by water and erosion over a very long time, not a collapsed volcano top.

Whatever you call it, it's vast. The basin runs about 7 miles long and 2 miles wide, and its floor sits roughly half a mile below the rim.

Cinder cones are scattered across the floor in red, orange, and black. Standing on the rim feels more like looking at another planet than at Hawaii.

The park was originally part of a much larger park created in 1916, which also included two volcanoes on the Big Island. In 1961, those were split off into their own park.

That's when Haleakalā became a separate national park. Later, in 1976, much of the crater area was set aside as protected wilderness.

The volcano is dormant rather than extinct. Its last eruption happened sometime between 1480 and 1600.

Another local celebrity grows here: the silversword, a spiky silver plant that lives for decades, blooms once, and then dies. It grows naturally almost nowhere else on Earth.

Watch the sunrise from the summit, but book your reservation ahead of time and bring warm clothes, since it can be near freezing at 10,000 feet. Hike a stretch of the Sliding Sands Trail down into the basin for a closer look at the cinder cones. Drive out to the Kīpahulu district on the coast for waterfalls and pools, a completely different side of the same park.