Haleakalā National Park
— — a mountain that holds the sunrise.
Not only on a wall.
“A shield volcano on Maui that the old Hawaiians called the House of the Sun. The summit stands at ten thousand and twenty-three feet, above the trade-wind clouds and above almost everything that grows. Silversword plants live nowhere else on earth. The sunrise reservation system fills weeks ahead, and on a clear morning the crater goes red the moment before the day.
Haleakalā National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Haleakalā National Park covers about 33,000 acres on the island of Maui, divided between the summit district and the Kīpahulu coastal section. The summit of the volcano reaches 10,023 feet, the highest point on the island, and looks down on a depression seven and a half miles across, formed by erosion rather than collapse. The park was set aside in 1916 as part of Hawaii National Park and split off as its own unit in 1961. The National Park Service administers all access; Crater Road climbs from sea level to the summit in under forty miles.
Haleakalā translates from Hawaiian as House of the Sun, the name a reference to the demigod Māui, who was said to have lassoed the sun from the summit to slow its passage across the sky. Sunrise from the summit is the park's signature: visitors arrive before four in the morning, drive up Crater Road in the dark, and watch the day return across the cinder. Since 2017 the National Park Service has required a per-vehicle reservation for any arrival between 3 and 7 am, sold through recreation.gov in a release window that closes within minutes.
At 10,023 feet the summit holds about two-thirds of the oxygen of sea level. Temperatures sit thirty degrees colder than the coast, often near freezing before dawn, and the wind crosses the rim with nothing to break it. The silversword, Argyroxiphium sandwicense, grows only at this elevation on Haleakalā; the plant lives twenty to ninety years, flowers once with a tall stalk of purple blossoms, sets seed, and dies. Most of the species' surviving range sits inside the park boundary.