You must be thinking of a different island. Hawaii, the Big Island is big. 93 miles long, 76 miles wide. Maui has a narrow waist (an isthmus connecting two volcanos), 6 miles across.
This description still applies to Big Island (if we stretch it a bit):
> You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.
You can drive from the beach on the leeward side, going past dry ranchland with an average annual rainfall of ~10-15" (similar to arid West Texas places like Midland), to the Mauna Kea Observatory, where snow can sometimes be found, in under an hour and a half; and from there across to the windward side, back to the beach at Hilo, with about 10 feet of rain a year, in another hour and 15 minutes or so.
We did a tour to Mauna Kea and watched the sunset from above the cloud layer. It was spectacular.
And as you say, snow, whereas we'd been on the beach just a couple of hours before. Guide didn't drive straight up due to acclimatization and I still got slightly dizzy up there, it's over 4200m (13800 ft) up there after all.
While the Big Island is certainly much larger than the other Hawaiian islands, it's not huge. We did day trips covering about a third of the island, including multiple tourist-y stops. And yea the nature there kept surprising us again and again.
