The crater basin on Haleakala

If you’ve never tried it, I highly recommend it. It’s extremely cool – especially if you go from sea level to the top in one day.

We did this almost a year ago, on Haleakala. It was amazing: at the summit, you have a short walk up to the top of a nearby peak. This is no more than 1/5th of a mile, yet we could barely catch our breath. ‘Course, I won’t talk about how pathetic my conditioning is, either

On the way down, I nearly passed out – just from trying to take a pic of a bird nearby.  The action of squatting down, tensing, and constricting my oxygen intake was enough to almost drop me.

It was cool, in a weird way.

The guy who nearly did me in:

Bird on Haleakala