Almost Paradise

I hiked the Hawai‘i Loa Ridge Trail today with Chris, Tommy, and my coworker Rick. The Hawai‘i Loa Ridge Trail has the best looking trailhead I have ever seen. It’s part of a private park that’s reserved for residents and their guests at the top of an exclusive gated neighborhood. Hikers’ vehicles are allowed in designated stalls, but if you’re not a resident or a guest you aren’t allowed to use the park at all.

Being part of the Na Ala Hele trail system, the beginning of the trail was well-marked and even featured a boot scrubber to help keep hikers from tracking alien weed seeds into the mountains.

Aside from his day job, Rick is a botanist and nature photographer. He brought along a spiffy camera that put my little Sony snapshot taker to shame, and even lugged a tripod with him. Now, that’s hard core.

It was a great day for a hike, cloudy and cool. We started out through fairly open terrain…

…which was followed by a few stands of ironwood trees, and then a lot of guava…

…before breaking out into more open areas of uluhe fern with koa and ‘ōhi‘a trees. Ahh, now this was more like it! Classic native Hawaiian forest terrain.

After the first couple of miles, it started to get steep. We found that the trail managers (thank you, DLNR) have installed a whole lot of steps along the trail for erosion control. They’re made of plastic lumber, so as not to rot, and are secured with big steel spikes. We were to become intimately familiar with these wonderful devices. There were a lot of them, and they made the climb much, much easier.

There were also ropes at some points, usually where the trail was so eroded that there were few footholds available. Tommy finally got the hang of using them (no pun intended).

The trail got even steeper, and turned into a dirt stairway angling up at what must be a 45º slope. The view was dizzying, both up and down. It was a little spooky. Rick commented that the last time he’d been on this trail, a dozen years ago, the steps hadn’t been installed yet and it had been even spookier.

Finally, after a bit more than 3 hours of hiking and climbing, we made it to the top. Those grins on the boys’ faces are partly triumph and partly relief that the worst is over. We had lunch and then turned around to do a 2 hour descent.

The view was a typical Ko‘olau summit view, which is to say that it was spectacular, even considering the light haze still lingering from Friday’s nasty spell of vog. Compared with the view from the top of the Lanipo Trail, Hawai‘i Loa Ridge’s view isn’t quite as dramatic, since Olomana is off to one side rather than in the dead center of your field of vision, but it’s still gorgeous. Thanks again to Kathy for stitching the photos together for me.

A note on plants. Now, I’m no expert on native Hawaiian plants. I can recognize koa and ‘ōhi‘a and kukui and uluhe, but that’s about it. Having Rick along was an eye-opener, as he pointed out native plants left and right that I would have passed by without a second glance:

‘Ulei

Pukiawe

‘Iliahi

Maile

‘Ōhi‘a lehua

A native lobelia

‘Ilima

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 6th, 2005 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Hiking/Outdoors, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.