Haleakala Crater Sunset Tour

By Saint Greg

October 6, 2025

I booked the Haleakala Crater Sunset Tour through Carnival. The tour is $185 but I booked it when they had a 20% off excursions sale. That took my price down to $148. I paid for it with my Carnival Mastercard which gives me a 10% statement credit on Carnival excursions so it actually cost me about $133.

Our tour is at 3pm with a 2:45 meeting time. I believe we are the only afternoon/evening tour so our meeting location was easy to find. We have a fancy bus pulling up.

Very nice!

We have plenty of legroom, cup holders, and power/USB/USB-c options.

We have a 15 minute break at Kula Marketplace.

It’s interesting that they carry Alaskan. I’m looking for local singles.

We’ll go with this one.

We’re driving through clouds now.

We’re at 6,500 feet now. We’re going to 10,000.

We have a 20-minute stop at the Visitor Center.

We have 20 minutes and 3,000 feet in elevation to go.

We’re at 8,000 feet now.

We have 20 minutes here then we go to the other side. We are lucky the crater is clear today. Our guide said sometimes groups come up here and can’t see anything. I guess you win some (today) and lose some (rock of Gibraltar)

This crater is the size of Manhattan.

They have used this crater to film mars scenes in movies and you can see why.

A look outside of the crater.

Now we’re on the other side.

There are a couple of trails you can take on foot. I’m going to do both. This first one is about a half a mile round trip.

This is the view from the first trail.

That’s the road that takes you to the summit. I want to be up there by sunset.

You know I can’t be happy with one. I’m going to try to do both.

The summit is a half mile walk one way. But at least it’s a paved road.

We can see the moon over the crater now

The parking lot at the summit is full so they have the road closed off. So you don’t really have to worry about cars coming up right now.

That parking lot is where the bus is parked.

The couple in the background behind this guy just had a proposal. I barely missed it so I asked if they would do it again. They didn’t.

Notice how warm everyone is dressed. I had no idea it was going to be this cold. It’s in the 40’s up here. I have a t-shirt and a baseball jersey on.

I’m heading back down to the visitors center to catch some of the sunset down there.

I took some shots on the way down.

This is from down by the Visitor’s Center.

I got back on the bus 20 minutes early and it was full. They were ready to go. Actually there was one lady that sits next to me who was still out. She came back about 5 minutes after me and we left 15 mins early.