sade005

A week or so before Thanksgiving 1994, I received an email message from Guy Kaulukukui, a good friend and like me, a graduate of the Kamehameha Schools,  a private K-12 institution for children of Hawaiian ancestry. Always one to seek out challenges of some kind, Guy had a new one he wanted me to consider: a hike to the top of Mauna Loa on the Big Island. To help spark my interest, Guy said that he'd send me a couple of pieces he read about the hike via snail mail. After receiving and reading these pieces--"Cairns," a chapter from Peter Adler's  Beyond Paradise , and "Ten Views of Mauna Loa," a chapter from The Burning Island by Pamela Frierson--I knew reaching the ML summit was something I wanted to do. We set a tentative hike date for early August. In the next several months, we went about gathering as much information as we could about the hike. Guy, at the time in the midst of completing his PH.D dissertation (economics) at the U...