Day 3. There exists an hour of the day when no self-respecting college fellow should have to wake up, and I hereby decree that hour is any time before 9 in the hours before noontime. So when we were told to wake up at the crack of yesteryear to load up, several complaints were aired. But a few stayed strong and fought the urge to let out a belch or moan about the departure time, and so we set off for a very high day in the mountains. The story of Day 3 can be told in several units of time, but I'll select one that was most appropriate for this day: the number of times we told Johanna she should be careful of fainting on Mauna Kea. (Earlier on the trip, Johanna gave a riveting account of how she fainted in a bunch of running races and somehow that related to her fear of blood and/or needles.) Let T = the number of times we mentioned to Johanna that she was liable to faint in thin air.
T=0. We loaded up the MANhicles, which had become two because alas each had both guys and girls in them that day. We then headed down in the direction of the airport to pick up Paul's friend Mike Garcia, who seems to have been unendingly knowledgable about volcanoes. Before we picked up Mike, someone remembered Johanna's plight of fainting, and T soon increased to at least 5. The airport, at approximately zero feet above sea level (plus or minus 100 feet, we scienced it) provided an excellent starting point. We soon began to climb northwest up and out of Hilo, and into the saddle between the two giant volcanoes. At 6,000 feet, T≈12, because every time our ears popped, it reminded us that we needed to make sure Johanna was okay.
Rain clouded our way for much of the ride up, and it was not until we reached the visitor's center at roughly 9,000 feet or T=14 that we emerged, heroically, from the mist. Our rental car smelled like someone had lit it on fire slowly and methodically, starting at the tires, but Paul checked that the parking brake was off like six or seven times, so it was okay.
We then hiked up a small cinder cone and successfully answered like 1 in 5 of Mike's questions. It looked like it would rain, so Kalle put on his plastic bag skirt/kilt, or skillet for short.
Just a man and his skillet
Head-scratching and sky-looking during a series of trick questions.
The hiking at 9,000 wasn't so bad. Johanna was doing fine. At the bottom, T=16 because we discussed at length how she hadn't fainted yet but a quick science calculation told us we still had almost 5,000 feet yet to climb, so we reminded her to be careful again. Roadhouse.
However, up at 12,000 feet, T began to approach 100. Our walk turned to a crawl as the mountain air laid bare the lungs of even the fittest of athletes. John acclimated to altitude especially poorly, and could be seen lying on his back regaining his breath or running off to find a place to leave part of his morning's Breakfast Lanai findings on the mountain. Tommy was seen laughing at him. We made our way up to a lake, apparently the highest in the Pacific, and gladly ate our lunches and tried unsuccessfully to refrain from complaint and/or weakness. Mike said some more things about rocks...things that most of us enjoyed but which may not enthrall the reader. Because we were asking Johanna if she was okay roughly every other second, the value of T was quickly escaping the realm of imagination.
Altitude gets the better of Ian's face
The highest lake in the Pacific. By our calculations, probably bottomless.
We hiked back down to the cars, and we were glad not to have to walk much further that day. Snow coverage in some places increased as we made our way to the top, and Tommy and Ian saw some ski lines that brave individuals had carved some weeks earlier. Some Haters said that they weren't ski lines but melt features.
At the top, T, for our purposes, was roughly infinity plus or minus, to quote John, a crizazy, zazy, crazy number. Kalle tried to drive off a cliff and hold a distant cinder cone in his hand (pictured below) but was unsuccessful on both counts.
Bros bros bros! You want some cones, bros?
Kalle nearly drives off a cliff
Some astronomy things. Well-placed out of the range of tsunami, quite poorly placed out of the range of reckless driving.
Tommy reenacts Pele's birthing of the entire mountain of Mauna Kea. Notice Johanna supporting herself AND Tommy!
Proof all of us were still standing at the top
Kalle attempts to hold a cinder cone in his hand, but the cinder cone nimbly escapes his grasp.
After blowing up the Keck Telescopes' public bathrooms, we headed back down into the saddle, where we saw a wall diverting a large Mauna Loa pahoehoe flow surprisingly successfully. We were thoroughly exhausted from hiking like 1500m to and from the lake and 50m around the summit, but we had survived, and no one had fainted. Those of us poking fun at Johanna were all proven to be Big Ol' Haters, similar to the ones that tried to say there were no ski tracks but at least...3 times that size. Final counts for T could not be obtained because they were too damn high, which ironically is also sort of how we felt about the mountain. Did I take the T joke too far? Yes. Roadhouse.
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