Not much more needs to be said about Dave Hoefler‘s appropriately titled shot of a boy – and his dog at Alki. We just really enjoy how the object of the dog’s attention is out of sight. No one knows how far he paddled into the salty waters of Elliott Bay…or if he did at all.
We’re traveling a bit west for Glimpses’ return from a short hiatus – all the way to the coast, to be exact. “Beach ride” by zenobia_joy finds us over in Long Beach, WA contemplating the salty air and the wind rushing through the dunes…
In fall, the Seattle resident’s fancy often turns to thoughts of wintering on a tropical island somewhere. On November 30, the sun will set here at 4:20 p.m. Cliff Mass is already doing his snow dance. But the Hawaiian Islands are direct flights away on both Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Airlines.
I made the journey for the first time last Labor Day weekend, and I’m in a position now to tell you that they’ve got a pretty good thing going out there. Even the jet lag works in your favor: a Seattle visitor wakes around sunrise, and gets sleepy at 9 p.m. You don’t even need to time shift if you don’t want to.
Certainly in comparison to winter in Seattle, I am not persuaded that there’s a bad choice to make in terms of a Hawaiian getaway. You can rent a secluded villa, you can stay in a pick-your-star hotel, you can browse an assortment of resorts that cater to tourists of every demographic. You can spend your time snorkeling or sunbathing; hiking, biking, or kayaking; catching sunrise from atop a volcano or sunset with a mai tai in hand. There are food festivals, hula festivals, and film festivals.
No matter what draws you away from the mainland, some night in the darkness with the surf in your ears, you’ll imagine you’re a bird alighted on a rock in mid-ocean. The enormity of the Pacific depths–you see it in the stained blue out to the horizon, but in daylight it’s a postcard. At night, it’s alive and immense. By the time you wake, it will have scoured away all the lesser cares that bedevil you.
For myself, an inaugural Kaanapali food festival was the draw, and while on Maui, I stayed at the Sheraton Maui Resort & Spa. I flew into Kahului airport, and then arranged transportation to Kaanapali in western Maui. The drive takes 45 minutes to an hour, and a shuttle bus will cost about $50. Taxis make the trip for about $100. If you don’t mind making transfers with luggage, the public bus system will get you there for $2. You can also rent a car.
The beach at Kaanapali is fronted by a series of resorts and hotels, all of which share a 2-mile promenade that gets heavy use all hours of the day by walkers and joggers. I had worked out a mutually beneficial agreement on price with the Sheraton, since this was a working vacation, but even so it felt a bit glamorous to step into my junior suite in Building 2, with its ocean-view balcony. After reopening from a three-year renovation in 2007, they’d decided to spruce the rooms up again in 2011, to the tune of $6.5 million.
Coincidentally, the Sheraton is, like Seattle Center, celebrating its 50th year. It has expanded in the intervening time, but the original building by George Wimberly still nestles the Black Rock outcropping, like a stacked series of shells. All the public space, then, was up top, with the guests’ rooms on the cliffside descent. It remains a breathtaking viewpoint, and in its way a kind of sister architectural landmark to the Space Needle. You’ll feel at home.
The resort now boasts more than 500 rooms on its 23 acres, the majority of which have ocean views. But if you turn your back to the ocean and look inland, there are equally dramatic views: Across an 18-hole, manicured golf course, the land rises steeply into a cloudcap that sends phantom mists to cool overheated beach blanketers. No matter where you are on the property, Maui’s beauty keeps smacking you in the eye.
After getting lost a few times, I downloaded the Sheraton Maui app for my iPhone, which includes a map that tells you where are: the tennis courts, spa at Black Rock, Mai Tai and Cliff Dive bars, Black Rock Steak and Seafood restaurant, Teppan-yaki Dan, and towel kiosk. You can make reservations for dinner or a massage with it. I can vouch for the massage being a brilliant idea.
I spent a good deal of time at the Cliff Dive bar, which has a happy hour and dishes built around pulled pork. It is also worth ordering the Ahi Ahi Benedict at Black Rock Steak and Seafood. (Prices on resort restaurant food in Maui reminded me of Iceland–if it’s not a pineapple or pork, it will probably run you more than you’re used to “back home.” This isn’t gouging so much as a reflection of costs peculiar to islands.)
At Kaanapali, you are just up the road from Lahaina, once a whaling village, though these days it’s your wallet or purse that’s more likely to be harpooned. (If you’re a guest at the resorts, you can hop a shuttle bus that travels between them, and will drop you at Lahaina. Or there is the Sugar Cane Train.) Lahaina is also where you can find West Maui Cycles–they have cruisers for tooling around town, and hybrids for trips along the incredibly scenic coastal highway. You’ll see lots of snorkelers as you pass Honolua Bay. (Tip: Bring plenty of coconut water.)
That inter-resort shuttle is complimentary for resort guests, as part of your $25-per-day resort fee, which also provides you with free internet and beach towels. Depending on the length of your stay, you might not feel a great need to leave the resort. Sun, spa, sushi–it’s all within reach. But a concierge can help you plan excursions, if you’d like to explore.
That sunrise trip to the volcano is a bit of an all-day trek from Kaanapali (and there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself in a cloud), but Seattleites in particular might like to tour the Kaanapali Coffee Plantation, where MauiGrown Coffee comes from. They grow four varieties: Yellow Caturra, Red Catuai, Typica, and Maui Mokka, the last of which cries out for a Clover-machined cup. Tours take you out into the fields to taste the raw berries. Maui Country Farm Tours will be happy to show you around the local artisan growers–at O’o Farm, you get lunch while you’re there. It’s a different side of island life than you may be used to.
The Sheraton Maui pours Maui Brewing Company beers, but the brewery itself is just up the road from Kaanapali. If you’ve been to the Elysian, it’ll smell familiar. Their Bikini Blonde lager goes down very easily, but at the brewery you can taste their Hawaii 9.0/Wee Heavy Scottish ale, a 2012 gold medal winner at the Great American Beer Festival. That and their Doppelbock are proof that they are serious about all kinds of beer, not just beach-side refreshment. If you are a beer fan, this is a destination.
One of Maui’s biggest fans was Mark Twain, who as a young correspondent set out from San Francisco to alert readers to the glories of the islands. Years later he still prized the memories: “I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.”
Twain tried “surf-bathing,” as he was told it was called, but did not quite get the trick of staying on the board, which shot off without him. He did catch the sunrise from the dormant volcano Mount Haleakala. Here, see if this sounds worth it:
We climbed a thousand feet up the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit, where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night. With the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us. Mounted on a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent wonders. The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance. A broad valley below appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar plantations alternating with dun squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished to mossy tufts.
And here is part two in our continuing series of ways to beat the heat. Thanks to Afrin Catalano for the add to our Flickr pool.
This sun-tinged shot from zenobia_joy reminds us that beach weather is finally here. Rejoice!
Rainy season is still quality hiking, don’t let the fair-weathered fool you. Several of Washington’s best hikes are four-season accessible, most notably the coastal gems dotting Olympic National Park’s rugged Pacific boundary. Cape Alava, a frontier ocean post forged from glaciers, corrosive sea forces, and native history stands eerily at the westernmost point of the lower 48, on the edge of world.
The Olympic beaches are the best ocean coast in the Northwest, hands down. Showcasing forested bluffs that leer over rugged, untamed stretches of weather-beaten shoreline, they’re also scarred by ancient petroglyphs and sacred burial plots that fuel the area’s surreal moodiness.
The landscape evaporates only to suddenly resurface out of constantly shifting marine systems that consume sunny skies, transforming postcard beaches into an otherworldly haze in an instant–a fitting frame for the sacred burial islands offshore that creep in and out of sight with each shift of the wind. At any moment the familiar setting transforms unannounced: A rocky outpost that you swear wasn’t there ten seconds ago has silently materialized thirty yards offshore. Everything is shifting, from the tides, to the light, to field of vision.
Fogs, marine layers, mists of every name appear in this rotating tidal landscape; a blue afternoon sky gone with disorienting, ghostly intimacy in an instant. Weathered, sea-tested spruces cling to the sandy cliffs, enveloped one minute, boldly preening overhead the next. Rocky offshore islands hold small strands of tortured evergreens like forgotten prisoners.
Unlike the shamefully trashy Mad Max freeway beaches of Oregon and southern Washington, these locales are far beyond the littered routes of the Winnebago crowd’s shore-trashing caravans. Beautiful boardwalk trails through mossy spruce bayous and randomly grassy meadows filter out the lazy drive-thru types for the appreciative and committed. There’s simply no comparing true wilderness destinations to those that permit motorized access.
There aren’t many places left where you feel like you aren’t on the same planet anymore, where the atmosphere and scenery seems so big or mesmerizing that it cant possibly belong to the same mundane universe with which we’ve grown so familiar. Few locations–Olympic National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage site–induce the rare euphoric insight and heightened senses that only the epiphany of physical appreciation can bring.
Cape Alava has that quality, enhanced by the disorienting funhouse mirror affect the restless weather plays.
The centerpiece, if positioned north, is the foreboding stone fortress renamed Cannnonball Island, a sacred Makah burial site towering ominously in and out of perspective with a fascinating lack of welcome. Scramble for a foothold to the base of the island’s far western edge, tide permitting, for a momentary perch on the ever shifting edge of the world–living or otherwise.
Directions here.
