The Most Interesting Roads - Big Island, Hawaii

Continuing on with our series about the world's most interesting roads, today's episode: The Big Island, Hawaii. I lived on in the state of Hawaii for 3 years. It's a great place in a lot of ways, and would be a car lovers paradise if it wasn't for two things: The salt in the air and the other drivers on the road.

I spent time on The Big Island (as the island of Hawaii is colloquially known), and it's just as fascinating, yet different, as the other islands. It's big enough that you can forget that you're on an island, and the terrain varies enough to keep things interesting. The roads are a blast (as long as no one else is on them),

The road that I found the most interesting is the saddle back road that bisects the island, west to East. It rises and falls and twists and turns, and if you need scenery, there's not one, but two active volcanoes. Mauna Kea is the volcano to the North, and Mauna Loa is the one to the south.

Both are active, and, as you read this, Hawaii is getting bigger by the minute, as the lava flows into the seas and increases the size of the island. Of course, if you want to make the drive even better, you can head up Mauna Kea itself.

There's a paved road that goes about a third of the way up, and there's a nice park ranger station/view point where there's huge warning signs about don't go any further and to beware of invisible cows. Of course I ignored these signs since I was driving a rental car.

Now, allow me at this point to most strongly suggest that you DO NOT try driving your rental car up the gravel road to the top of Mauna Kea. There's fine print in that rental agreement that says you're not supposed to do that sort of thing, and if your rental ride gets stuck, getting it unstuck would cost you metric tons of money.

I, however, am an idiot, and I drove our rental car all the way to the top. At 13796 feet, the summit is about as high as Mount Rainier, which is to say very, very high. You can see all the way down to the sea (if there's no clouds), and up at the tops there's a dozen or so telescope observatory.

The view is tremendous, and the road, if you've done any sort of rallying, is a blast. When we got back down to the ranger station, they were amazed that a crazy haole would even try. Until I mentioned that I used to rally.

"Oh, so you drive roads like this for fun?"

"Yeah!"

"Do you think we should run a race here?"

"You bet! ... " And 20 minutes later I had them convinced that the U.S. Park Service should be holding a Pike's Peak style race to the top of Mauna Kea. Seems that common sense prevailed, because I never heard of anyone racing there.

If you find yourself on The Big Island, I recommend checking out the first third of the road.

Source: National Geographic. Photos from Flickr users Randy Stewart and Jeff Marquis.