Maui’s Haleakala volcano review: beautiful, but check the weather forecast!

First published on May 21, 2011

Heading up to the Haleakala crater at sunrise is one of the must-do Maui activities. The pictures and descriptions cause little hesitation about getting up at 2 or 3am in order to experience it. You can drive up yourself, or take a tour, or take a tour with a bike ride down. You can explore much of it on foot as well.

There are plenty of places on the Hawaiian islands where it is almost always sunny and dry; Haleakala is not one of them! The weather up there is generally cold and windy, but you can deal with that by bundling up appropriately. Most importantly, it can be cloudy and rainy up to 25% of the time at Haleakala. On those days, the sunrise will consist of standing inside the visitor centre, huddled close together with everyone else, looking at the varying shades of gray of the clouds! I know this firsthand, because I made the mistake of not checking the forecast before booking a non-refundable tour!

By all accounts, it is a beautiful sunrise, the crater itself looks like another planet, and there is plenty of interesting vegetation… but do a bit of weather forecast research beforehand — and plan your scheduling accordingly — to increase your chances of actually being able to see it all!

This entry is filed under Travelling and written by Peter Keung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

One Response to “Maui’s Haleakala volcano review: beautiful, but check the weather forecast!”

May 25th, 2011 at 12:25 am
tim says:

I second your recommendation, though I will say that the sunset looks just as good in photographs, and won’t throw off your sleep schedule as much. Congrats BTW!