KAILUA-KONA, Hawaii -- It's icy up here, waiting for sunset. When I booked the trip, they asked me what size parka I needed. Peculiar question for a trip to Hawaii. But the summit of Mauna Kea, at 13,796 feet, can be brutal. Not just freezing but windy too.

Hawaii's Big Island is one of the few places in the world where you can snorkel all morning among yellow tangs and parrotfish, then head up the mountain in the afternoon, 20 miles away as the crow flies, to watch the sunset from a mountain peak sometimes dusted, sometimes adrift, in snow.

The experience is made rarer still by the presence of 13 observatories, built on this peak because the air is cleaner - less dust, less "light pollution" - than anywhere else on the habitable Earth. It's a spot strangely free of the vog, or volcanic fog, that churns from another point on this same island, not 60 miles away, where Kilauea Volcano's active lava flow belches great billows of smoke as it meets the sea. Just about anywhere else in the world, a beautiful sunset would be considered the curtain call of a day well spent. On Mauna Kea, it's only the prelude to a sky show unsurpassed, where the plot turns on the secrets of Polynesian navigation that guided those ancient sailors to these islands.

I booked the "Mauna Kea Summit & Stars Adventure" with Hawaii Forest & Trail (808-331-8505; www.hawaii-forest.com), an award-winning tour operator that limits its group size to 10 - the number of passenger seats in its big-windowed vans. The tour costs $176, tax included, and lasts about eight hours round-trip from the company's office in Kailua-Kona.

Most of the trip is spent in the van, riding through terrain that changes from old lava flows to cinder cones set in alpine pastures as the guide - Greg, a former fisheries biologist, in my case - touches on geography, Hawaiian history and contemporary local politics. They pass out the parkas after an early dinner under sweet smelling pines, taken at an old rancher's outpost. The air is chilly at this stop but not yet unbearable, and mist-filled, as wispy clouds, like ethereal family pets, move in.

As the quest continues, we break above the clouds, driving on what Greg tells us is the third-highest paved road in the world - until the pavement parlays into gravel. We pass snow plows at ease in a parking lot; two terminal moraines, the calling card of glaciers; and pickup trucks headed back down the mountain, their beds packed with snow and festooned with shovels. Hawaiians, it seems, enjoy snowball fights on the beach.

We arrive at the summit 10 or 15 minutes before sunset. Considering the elevation - going from sea level to almost 14,000 feet can induce altitude sickness - and the cold, that's enough time to look around a bit and take a few photos.

Ancient Hawaiians revered this place, and some locals still maintain a sacred site here. The other marvels are all those observatories that, combined, are far more versatile and collect 60 times more light than the Hubble Space Telescope, according to Dr. Gareth Wynn-Williams, professor of astronomy at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. They were built here because for 300 days a year this air is the cleanest in the world, Greg says, partly because of an atmospheric condition called afternoon inversion. The clouds stay below, trapping moisture and dust. And sure enough, the air is so dry here that despite the cold you can't see your own breath vaporize.

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