Today was the last big day on Hawaii and it was truly epic!
My plan was doing Mauna Kea. I had SAG support (by Chris DeMarchi, Hawaii Epic Cycling).
He reached out to me yesterday when he planned on doing MK with another client and they had closed the Mauna Kea Access Road (that is the last 20k of the climb, that incidentally make it the world’s hardest climb).
I started out today very early, when Chris picked me up at 5:30am. A long day better has an early start!
It’s a ritual to dip the bike tires in the ocean to literally start the ride at sea level.
At 6a.m. I set off from Waikoloa Beach, with at least 88km of climbing ahead of me.
The first hour was in complete darkness, but the sun lingered behind Mauna Loa.
One hour in, I had climbed 700m, travelled 21k and had Mauna Kea in sight!
When I saw how much snow there was on MK, I had a bad feeling about them re-opening the Route in time (the last update was from the day before).
After around 20k, I turned right onto the upper (busy) highway and then onto Saddle Road.
Saddle Road connects the Hilo and Kona side of the island and goes up to almost 2100m/7000ft.
A lot of cars left and right and a lot goats, too.
I took a first break after 2.5 hours and around 1600m (1 mile) of climbing.
About an hour later I had reached MK Acess Road, and they said it might open by Noon… maybe. I didn’t want to take this chance (and wait for hours) and did a right instead of left turn.
That was a good decision, as MK access road stayed closed for the entire day:
Good thing, Hawaii has one of the most epic climbs in the world right next to the most epic climb in the world.
I turned onto Mauna Loa Access Road.
Mauna Loa is world’s largest volcano (by area) and almost as high as MK. The problem for cyclists is, that the last 2000’ of the mountain are rough trail. And that’s no comparison to MK. It’s big volcanic rocks! If anyone completed Mauna Loa to the top, that would probably be the toughest climb in the world - no one has done that so far as far as I know.
I didn’t either.
The Mauna Loa is a very special climb, in that just a narrow (but well maintained) road snakes up the climb in wavy undulations, through nothing but Lava fields. This road will take you from 2100/7000 to 3360/11300. This is the closest you can get to moonscape on Big Island.
Chris took a lot of cool pictures and I’ll just post them in somewhat correct order:
At 10’000ft, I started feeling the altitude for the first time (ever). Especially the undulating road with many pitches above 12% really got to me. The air felt thin and I felt weak. The feeling was a little uncanny and I felt lightheaded a few times.
Luckily, it wasn’t far to the top anymore.
When I finally reached the top, I was relieved (also kinda relived that MK was closed, because this was very hard already). Now I have another good reason to return to the Big Island to get the one that got away.
Chris had prepared a cool “finishers trophy” to remind me of the pain and the beauty of this climb.
PJAMM calls it the “world’s longest climb”, which doesn’t make a ton of sense in my mind, but it’s an epic adventure surely.
Many thanks to Chris for the great support along this 6 hour (+2 hours driving down again) adventure!