Here Are Some Travel Tips For Exploring Our Partner National Parks of Hawaiʻi!
Hawaiʻi Island and Maui national park sites offer a variety of ecosystems, landscapes, and cultural experiences. Let’s explore, and we will give you a couple of tips about where to stay, too!
Read more: Where Are You Going To Spend Your 2025 National Park Fee-Free Days?
Aloha! O Amelie Sterling koʻu inoa.
My name is Amelie Sterling.
O Waikahekahe Nui koʻu ahupuaʻa ma ka moku o Puna. O Kīlauea koʻu mauna. O ka ua Moanianilehua koʻu wai. O Kāpae koʻu makani. O wao kula kai kuʻu ʻāina e noho nei.
Waikahekahe Nui is my ahupua'a in the district of Puna. Kīlauea is my mountain. Moanianilehua rain is my water. Kāpae is my wind. I live in the dry coastal zone.
Read more: A Moment With Amelie Sterling: New Chair of the Hawaiʻi Pacific Parks Association Board
How Do Your Purchases From HPPA Support National Parks in Hawaiʻi and American Samoa?
Every purchase you make with us, whether at one of our national parks visitor center park stores or through our online shop, plays a direct role in preserving the natural and cultural heritage of national park sites in the Pacific. This is true of most national parks visitor center stores.
HPPA is a nonprofit partner of seven national parks and sites in the Pacific Region, and we operate in some of the most breathtaking parks in the Pacific, including Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, Haleakalā National Park, and Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park. Our mission is to inspire connection to these incredible protected places while providing visitors with meaningful experiences and memories.
So, Where Does Your Money Go?
Read more: How Your Holiday Purchases Support National Parks
Mel, what first sparked your passion for national parks and led you to work with Hawaiʻi Pacific Parks Association (HPPA)?
I didn’t grow up with much, but my dad had this passion for the outdoors. We had a farm, and his goal was to visit every national park in the U.S. Every summer, he’d close our used furniture business, and we’d hit the road. Yosemite became our home base, and we’d visit about four or five different national parks each year. My whole childhood was filled with these adventures.
At one of our favorite campgrounds, Summerdale, near Fish Camp outside Yosemite, they had what we called “Ranger Night.” There was this big bonfire, we’d roast marshmallows, and the ranger would give different talks every week. That kind of freedom—catching pollywogs, tubing down rivers, and hiking—just fueled my love for the parks.
I grew up amazed at how unique each park was: the geysers and wildlife of Yellowstone, the beauty of Montana’s parks. When I turned 14, I got my first job with the U.S. Forest Service, which was so exciting—I even got to ride in helicopters during forest fires!
A pivotal moment came when I was 15. In geometry class, I got a note asking if I’d like to get paid to work in Yosemite for the summer. That was through a program called Upward Bound, designed for underserved youth. We did college classes during the school year and worked in the parks during the summer. Those summers really shaped me—backpacking, taking water samples, leading night hikes. The rangers I worked with were passionate about stewardship, and that idea of caring for the land took deep root in me.
Read more: A Moment with Mel: A Journey Through National Parks to the HPPA Executive Directorship
It is seriously itsy. Less than 5mm long, harmless, and one of the best moms in the world.
The Hawaiian happyface spider, called nananana makakiʻi, gets its name in an obvious way: there is what seems to be a clownlike happy face on its back—technically the back of its abdomen. No one has yet agreed whether this is an adaptation that scares off larger animals that would enjoy a spider snack, or some more complex DNA shuffling happening within the population that just happens to make patterns that look like a happy face. There are thought to be nine species in the Hawaiian Islands with different “faces” or no “face” pattern at all.
But, although the happy face is certainly interesting to look at, this unusually long-legged, glassy, yellow-green jewel of an arthropod is complex in some possibly unexpected ways. For one thing, these wee Theridiidae-family spiders live on the undersides of leaves in the cool, upper-elevation native Hawaiian wet forests of Maui, Hawaiʻi Island, Molokaʻi and Oʻahu. At Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park they can sometimes be found in the deep green forest around Nāhuku (Thurston Lave Tube).
Wahi Pana Are Sacred Sites
Every civilization and culture reveres and respects certain areas or structures because something important to that culture’s history occurred, or is occurring, there. In Hawaiʻi, these may include burial or birth sites, war temples or places of healing, battlegrounds or water sources, the sites of legends or the homes of the legendary. In Hawaiʻi, these sacred sites are called wahi pana.
Hawaiʻi Island has three national park sites on the island’s west coast that are all, or in part, wahi pana.
Hawaiʻi is an island state built completely of volcanoes old and new. Hot and fluid magma circulating in the planet’s mantle seeps up to and through the crust as a plume and emerges on the seafloor in the middle of the Pacific Plate, where it methodically builds up a shield volcano. The plate is moving north/northwest and subducting under Japan/Russia at a rate of about 5-10 centimeters a year. So, like a great, slow, patient conveyor belt, the plate drifts over the “hot spot” of the mantle plume and volcanoes are built, one after the other.
Eventually the drift of the plate pulls the volcano off of the hot spot that formed it, and eruptions gradually cease. At that point, erosion and settling pick up speed and, just as steadily and constantly, the volcano is worn down to sea level, and then under sea level, too. Formerly high-standing volcanoes that are now under the waves are called “seamounts”, and they stretch nearly to Japan on the northeast end of the Hawaiian chain. The line of old seamounts and young volcanoes is nearly 4,000 miles long, and at the south/southeast end you find the youngest on Hawaiʻi Island, home to Kīlauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes. Jump just one island back to Maui, and there stands Haleakalā. These three volcanoes have been very active in the recent past and all three are within national park boundaries.
When the first people arrived to the present day Main Hawaiian Islands, those islands which are the youngest and tallest above the waves, they employed their immense powers of observation to note that the chain had an older/younger, smaller/larger flow to it. Stories rose from this understanding, powerful myths and legends about Pele, the volcano deity, who travelled the islets and islands from northeast to southwest, finally settling into the great summit caldera of Kīlauea.
The national park sites of Hawaiʻi offer rainforests and cloudforests, rare and delicate birds, tranquil sandy beaches, rocky lava shores, vibrant coral reefs, and winter visits by humpback whales. But many park visitors are surprised to find themselves swept away by something unexpected and unforeseen: the astonishing spangled night skies of Hawaiʻi.
The Hawaiian Islands are located in the middle of the largest ocean on the planet, The Pacific. They are relatively tiny in that vast sea, and so by luck of circumstance have less light pollution than the highly developed, light-saturated, sometimes dusty landscapes of the continental U.S. to the east or Asia to the west. In the Islands, to look at the gloriously bright arc of the Milky Way stretched overhead on a moonless night is truly to feel like you can reach up and touch it. Surprisingly deep emotions can suddenly arise, along with thoughts and questions about the place of humans in the enormity of the known (and unknown) Universe.
HPPA's Mary Cockett, who manages our three visitor center park stores at our partner Haleakalā National Park on Maui, filed this report from the Museum Store Association Trade Show held recently in Baltimore, Maryland. She says:
This was not just an industry event; it's a gathering of minds passionate about art, culture, and creativity. The air buzzed with anticipation, promising an array of innovative products and insights.
Stand in the Hawaiian cloudforest and close your eyes. The whirrr whirrr whirr of ʻapapane wings above you is a signature sound of the native forest. These striking red, black, and white birds (Himatione sanguinea) are constantly on the move, seeking the nectar of ʻōhiʻa lehua flowers. Small flocks work the canopy, restless and determined. A side development of this continual travel among the blossoms is that this is one of the most important pollinators of the native forest. ʻApapane chatter fills the trees all day, although the hour before sunset seems to swell the chorus. In the Hawaiian creation chant, The Kumulipo, the ʻapapane was one of the first beings born into the world.
The mosquito, capable of carrying deadly diseases between birds, arrived as larvae in the water barrels of whalers stopping over in Hawaiʻi in the early 1800s. Its arrival coincided with the introduction of birds (and their diseases) from all over the world by the new, primarily Western, arrivals to the islands, and once established contributed to a perfect storm of Hawaiian bird extinctions. To experience our forest birds now, you must climb the slopes of the volcanoes to pass through the bellies of the lowest clouds at about 4,000 to 5,000 feet above sea level. There, you may be treated to the sights and sounds of some of these most precious residents of the Hawaiian archipelago.
Read more: Whirr vs. Whine, Hawaiʻi Birds and the Catastrophic Arrival of the Mosquito
© COPYRIGHT HAWAIʻI PACIFIC PARKS ASSOCIATION 2017.