Pu'u Nianiau - January 14 2024
East Maui, Hawaii, USA
2088m
As one of our couple of fair-weather days, my dad and I had this one earmarked for a trip up to Haleakala, the high point of Maui with over 3000m of prominence. Of course, there are smaller subpeaks along the way which simply couldn't be ignored, and this is the first of those. We started the drive a bit later than anticipated in the evening, so we arrived at the small pull-off in front of the gated road for this peak just before 6pm. My dad, to his credit, was not put off by this, found a nice place to slip through the gate, and started walking while I swapped one of my shoes for a hiking shoe (my right foot was still healing from a nasty bruise sustained on Mauna Loa, so that stayed in a comfortable loafer instead).
My dad was feeling a bit tired on this day for whatever reason, so we took a whole 6-7 minutes to make it up to the radio tower, where we found ourselves with a fence between us and the true summit. My dad decided that was good enough for him, and enjoyed the sunset colours, while I did my best to find a way around. I tried going downhill to find a gap, but no dice, so I ended up just mantling over in the middle where it seemed like more people had done the same. The fence was fairly flimsy, but just stepping over and back into the wire gaps on the other side worked well enough, and I only ended up wasting 3 minutes figuring out my way across.
With that out of the way, it was just a minute walk to the top of the hill through the grasses. No bushwhacking required, there were large enough gaps between the bushes to just walk up between em. I grabbed a few photos and headed down with haste, since we wanted to catch the tail end of the sunset at the top of Haleakala still.
With that out of the way, I walked back, clambered over the fence, and we resumed our drive to the top of Haleakala for a more impressive summit (at least statistically, being able to drive up kinda ruins the "impressiveness" of ascending it).