Well, it took a couple of tries but I finally managed to run from a small beach near the bottom of the Chain of Craters Road to the Summit of Mauna Loa. It took quite the effort to complete this adventure covering 54 miles and over 14,000 feet of elevation gain in 19:58:05. And when […]
Wow – So this was a hard report to write – at least at first. It’s difficult to analyze your failures. Yet when you pick them apart enough you find the gems that allow for future success. And to effectively find these gems you really have to tear the wound open and brutally expose all […]
In a few days, I will be running from the Sea to Summit of Mauna Loa. Entertainingly I expected this adventure to be significantly more difficult than the Sea to Summit of Mauna Kea. I will also be doing this run completely self-supported. In this article, I’ll explain what makes this such a difficult route, […]
This run has changed multiple times over the last few weeks as I determined how well I would recover from each previous “Long” Run. Initially, it had been set to be the whole Mauna Loa Trail and back. Basically a 40-mile round trip from 6,700 feet to the 13,678-foot summit of Mauna Loa and back. […]
Let me start off by saying that Kīlauea presented quite a few more challenges than it seemed at first glance. First of all, how do you get a legitimate summit when the actual summit is not only off limits and illegal to get to, but also at some point it will likely fall into the […]
So yesterday I went on a 12-hour road trip with my Mom to the village of Volcano. It takes around two and a half hours to get there from my house so I had a checklist of questions I needed to have answered before I left. It was a blast just hanging with and chatting […]
On the water’s edge, the air is calm and tranquil yet you can hear the wind busting through the palm trees overhead. The full moon lights up the night sky as we step towards the gentle lapping waves offering our friend Bill Melson’s ashes to the sand and sea. Toby reaches into the ocean, filling […]
This is one of the harder ways to run up Mauna Kea. Though there is a road the whole way to 1/8 mile from the top, your greatest hurdle besides the distance and elevation will be the wind. The prevailing winds come from Hilo through the saddle and blow right down into Waikoloa (We jokingly refer to the area as Waiko-BLOW-a). So you will face a headwind from 5-35 mph for 41 miles until you reach the Mauna Kea Access Road.
