Our Mauna Kea Expedition (1994)
The Mauna Kea is the highest mountain of the world. Well, at least when you consider
the 5500 metres below the surface of the ocean. Above the surface there are 4205 m
left to climb. In 1994, during a vacation on Hawaii, Timo and I decided to climb it.
We parked our car 3 miles south of the mountain in the middle of the wilderness, put up our tent,
stayed a night, and started our tour the next morning.
The Mauna Kea, seen from our base camp, 3 miles south of the volcano
We started around 7 am. As we remembered our Grand Canyon Tour '92 where we needed only 5 hours
for a route that ostensibly takes 12, we thought we could climb the Mauna Kea in one day and be
back before sundown, so we didn't take our sleeping-bags with us.
Bad mistake. It took much longer than we thought. We had to fight with the dense jungle,
then with lava sand fields where we walked up three steps and slided back two,
with gulches that forced us to walk detours, and so on.
Me in the jungle
In the afternoon we realized that we wouldn't make it in one day. But although we knew that descending
in the night wouldn't be funny we decided that it was still better than to surrender.
Therefore we continued.
An hour before the sun went down (6:30 pm), we reached the summit.
Sometimes it was almost difficult...
Then the hard part began. As mentioned before, we didn't take our sleeping-bags with us, so
going to sleep wasn't an option. We had to descend in the night. Of course we had a flash-light
but it wasn't the brightest one. Its range was about 5 metres. Sometimes we reached the
edge of a gulch, looked down, couldn't see the ground, threw down a stone, didn't hear the
ground... Damned! Seems to be deep! And once again we had to walk a detour to look for another way
down...
Around 3 am we ran out of batteries. From now on, the only light came from the stars. At least
there were enough of them. I estimate we could see about 10000 stars in this night, more than
I had ever seen before at other places of the world.
We already were totally exhausted, but there were still miles to go. Two more hours passed. At 5 am
we ran out of water which made our situation even worse.
Meanwhile we were in a height where the jungle began again. It had been hard to cross
the forest by day. Now at night it was a real challenge...
But finally we made it!
At 7 am (and more dead than alive) we arrived at our car.
However, the story doesn't end here. Minutes later, the Military Police caught us, took us to the
police station and told us that this area was Federal property and it wasn't allowed to park the
car and put up a tent in it. It wasn't even allowed to leave the road leading through the area.
Oh dear. I expected some trouble.
But fortunately they believed us that we didn't know that so we didn't have to pay a penalty. So we talked
a while, we told them of our Mauna Kea expedition (they almost couldn't believe it that we made it
to the top), answered some questions they had about Germany and finally they brought us back to
our car and wished us a good holiday in Hawaii.
April 21, 1995
Back to my Homepage