Hawai'i Landscapes- Mauna Kea

Mauna Kea was such an otherworldly experience I think it deserves its own dedicated blog post. For those who don’t know, Mauna Kea is an inactive volcano on the Big Island of Hawai’i, and from land to summit it is 13,800ft. above sea level! Unfortunately half of the volcano is in the Pacific Ocean so Mount Everest is still considered the tallest mountain in the world (29,032ft. base to summit), otherwise if we are including the part of the volcano in the ocean to summit, Mauna Kea is technically 33,481ft. tall.

In planning our trip to Hawai’i the number 1 thing on our to-do list was to go up the volcano. There are some things that you need to plan ahead if you are making the trek yourself (otherwise there are plenty of tour companies that can bring you up, and will prep you accordingly):

  1. Having a 4WD vehicle is mandatory, you will be turned away if you do not have one. If renting a car, double check your agreement— most of the road up to the summit is unpaved and on rough terrain so lots of rentals do not allow you to take their cars up. For this reason we rented a truck on Turo and double checked with our renter ahead of time.

  2. Along with this you must have a full tank of gas— you will use lots of gas going up and down, and the nearest station is 50km away.

  3. You must stop at the visitors centre (9,2000ft) for at least 30 minutes to acclimate to the altitude change.

  4. Be weary of altitude sickness; it only gets worse the longer you continue, and can only get better by descending.

  5. You can only stay on the summit for about 30 minutes after sunset before a ranger escorts everyone down. Again, the road is unpaved, rough, and unlit. You can, however, continue stargazing near the visitors centre for as long as you’d like.

  6. Despite it being about 30C around the island, bring a jacket, pants, and layers for the summit! It was about 4C when we were there, and was getting cooler as the sun set.

We took a couple of side quests on this journey, the first being a quick hike up Pu’u Huluhulu quite literally right across the street from Mauna Kea’s access road. Just over 1km loop with 150m elevation gain, this short trip gives you beautiful view of the surrounding area from what felt like high up at the time lol. Another quest was nearly to summit; a 2km out and back ‘walk’ to Lake Waiau. Don’t let the 2km fool you though, this unmarked, unpaved, but very clear and easy to follow, trail is 13,000ft. above sea level and is much, much, harder than it sounds because of how thin the air is.

Much like trying to describe Hawai’i and it’s landscapes in general, I feel as though as most words will not do this justice. It really is a ‘you had to be there’ kind of thing. This was truly a once in a lifetime experience that we are so privileged to have both experienced, in addition to having these beautiful photos to commemorate it.

Landscapes below are available as prints— send us an email for more info! Click the photos below to enlarge and browse through.

Hawai'i Landscapes

Winter is always a time for us to refresh and reset but admittedly winter in Toronto is fairly drab so we always like to take some time off as a way to feel renewed. In years past we go all in on winter; take a long drive up north, bury ourselves in snow, and have some wine by the fire every night for a week straight. This year we wanted to change things up though. After working (and missing) most of summer, this winter we wanted to head somewhere warm. We have been talking about Hawai’i for a while— Ethan loved a trip to Maui he took years ago— so this year we finally said, let’s skip winter for a couple of weeks!

After some research we opted to go to the Island of Hawai’i, also known as Big Island, as in the largest— but interestingly youngest— of the Hawaiian Islands. There were a few key things that we wanted to do on this trip: Summit Mauna Kea, Papakōlea (Green Sand) Beach, and to hit up some black sand beaches. We’re happy to report that we did cover all of these things, and more!

We decided to stay on the less touristy side of the island near Hilo (we stayed in Pāhoa), instead of Kona, as it was closer to the attractions we wanted to go to. Unfortunately, Hilo in February is the more temperamental time of year with rolling rain, cloudy days, bigger waves, and cooler temperatures but in the end it worked out really well for us. Our first week was our ‘adventure week’ where we covered Mauna Kea, Papakōlea, Volcano National Park, Waimea, Waipio Valley, even taking a shelter dog on a field trip for the day from the Hawaiian Humane Society! We also lucked out having the beautiful Kehana Black Sand beach a short drive away from our AirBnB, which we absolutely made sure to visit every. single. day. Our last week was filled with nothing but sunshine and warm weather so it turned into our beach days where we started and finished our books, lounged around, and took in every last drop of sunshine before returning home to winter.

I don’t think I have enough words to describe how beautiful this trip was. Even Ethan said that he enjoyed it more than Maui (for different reasons!) Having so many landscapes— from the ocean, to tropical rainforests, incredible volcano-scapes (mountain like landscapes, but you know… with a volcano). Going from the water front to 2000+ft above sea level just driving across the highway; one moment you’re swimming, the next you’re quite literally driving through a cloud. In trying to capture this trip in one word, majestic, incredible, surreal, are all adjectives that fall short. Just know that we will be back, I simply cannot imagine a life where we don’t return.

Landscapes below are available as prints— send us an email for more info! Click the photos below to enlarge and browse through.

Landscapes from BC

As a first time BC visiter I (Stef) was asked constantly ‘how do you like it, are you enjoying it?’ and my answer to everyone was, ‘my little city brain can’t comprehend all of this (insert hand motion gesturing to the surrounding area)’. And the funny part is that everyone understood what I meant! I never realized that I hadn’t been around mountains until the first time we were in France, driving in Provence through mountains. Suddenly I was like, ‘wtf is all of this, these aren’t just big hills!?’ and BC very much felt like that but x1000. Being a city gal who’s countryside experience is just going up to the cottage for a handful of weeks a year, having the easiest access to waterfronts, to beautiful scenery, to be able to simply say ‘let’s watch the sunset from the top of the mountain tonight’ and to only put a minimal amount of effort to get there (some spots even in peoples backyard?!) was really astonishing to me!

So of course we had to document it. We’re always on the fence about what gear to bring, if any, when we travel. A couple of years ago we invested in a Fuji X100V to be our dedicated every day / travel camera; it’s light and compact, great quality, and still allows you to shoot in manual mode. Our biggest hang up about having cameras when we travel is that our serious gear is big, is heavy, is clunky, and no one wants to be lugging that around all day, but the Fuji is so slim it easily fits in a sling bag that it feels like there is no excuse to not have it on us at all times.

Since we were doing a couple of actual shoots in BC we did bring our serious gear (a whole packed Pelican, actually) so some of these photos are actually taken with a Nikon Z6II, some with a Fuji X100V.

Click the photos below to enlarge through

European Vacation

WHEN ONE OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS ANNOUNCED HER WEDDING WAS GOING TO BE IN GREECE, WE SAID “THANK YOU FOR THE EXCUSE TO VACATION” AND IMMEDIATELY STARTED PLANNING!

We flew in to Vouliagmeni (the location of our friends wedding, about a half hour south west from Athens airport) a few days before the wedding and stayed a couple of days afterwards. During our time there we were mostly at the beach adjusting to our jet lag in the best way possible. Greece, of course, has the best islands so we also went to visit Crete for about a week! We were lucky enough to be staying right on the beach in Chania where we had Ethan’s parents and sister join us. Truth be told, we were beach bums pretty much the whole time. We swam a lot, ate as much seafood as humanly possible, and it was perfect. Stef got sick part way through our time in Chania (conveniently on a day where we had planned to go on a hike) but Ethan and his family still hiked through the Agia Irini Gorge; It was about 7.5km long and the heat, lack of shade, and ruggedness of the terrain made it a challenging 3 hours, but the cold beer at the end made it all worth it! Another huge perk of the heat was that the trail was lined with thyme plants which were very fragrant from all the sunlight so much so the whole valley smelled like a turkey dinner!

FROM GREECE WE MADE OUR WAY TO ANDORRA VIA BARCELONA

We flew into Barcelona and proceeded to drive to Andorra. We don’t mind long drives as long as: 1. the road isn’t dead straight and 2. the scenery ain’t bad, and the 3hr drive from Barcelona to Andorra definitely checked those boxes. Seeing the rolling hill countryside of Spain transition into the Pyrenees mountains that make up most of Andorra was beautiful. Last time we were in Europe Ethan & I spent some time in Provence, which also has some large mountain ranges, but I don’t think they were comparable to Andorra. I’ve never felt so small before or have ever been so high up (case and point: on a rainy day we drove around we made it to the Andorra/Spain border which is 2300 meters above sea level!)

One of the reasons we went to Andorra is because Ethan wanted to go mountain biking at Vallnord, which is a stop on the Downhill Mountain Biking World Cup. Ethan here I’ll chime in for this bit since it’s biking related ;) Yes one of the big draws of Andorra was the biking so on our second day there I made my trip to Vallnord Bike Park. Stef was on the tail end of her illness from our time in Chania so she stayed at our Airbnb which wasn’t a bad place to be. I was anxious about my time in the bike park mainly because I wanted to ride the world cup course, but also knew this was one of the steepest tracks on the pro circuit. In total there were 3 lifts to get to the top which was at an elevation of 2351 meters above sea level and a total of 1100 meters elevation change from summit to base! The riding there was breathtaking and the views at the summit were 360 degrees of open mountains, and it was sometimes hard to focus on riding the trails because the views were so amazing. After warming up on a few less serious runs I went to the world cup track and I was HUMBLED as it was STEEPER than I could have ever guessed, despite studying lots of footage on the nights leading up to this ride! I did make it down in one piece but I had to walk down two sections because my mind really couldn’t comprehend taking a bike down haha

AND LASTLY, WE MADE OUR WAY TO (AND THEN FLEW HOME FROM) BARCELONA!

The best part of Barcelona (apart from the weather, architecture, history, etc etc etc) was the food! We strategically budgeted ourselves in the beginning parts of our trip so that we could splurge on food in Barcelona, and it did not disappoint! Whenever we are travelling abroad to oceanside places we make sure to take advantage of the seafood, and while arguably it was fresher in Greece, the meals in Barcelona were really something else. We both agreed that our last dinner, at La Mundada, was the best we have ever had… EVEN THE BREAD AND BUTTER WAS JAWDROPPING (caps for emphasis because we are so serious about how good it was!) Some of our other favourite food places were: Elche, Mabel the Granja, and L’Arroseeria Xàtiva. Apart from the food we spent most of our time- take a guess- at the beach. We did see La Sagrada Familia and Montserrat, and they were really truly breathtaking, but we both prefer laying down and relaxing as opposed running around touristing (also having not particularly planned to go into touristy places the lines were too long to make a last minute decision to see them).