Almost Paradise

I hiked the Kamanaiki Trail today with Chris, Tommy, and my coworker Roger. The trail starts at the end of Manaiki Place in Kalihi Valley, at a concrete stair between two houses. I was a little confused because the older photos I’d seen of the trail had shown a gray concrete stairway. Today, it was bright green. I wonder when they put in the Astroturf?

The stairway led up past the houses, and morphed from an Astroturf-covered concrete stair to a mossy lava rock staircase, damp and a little slippery. It climbed and climbed.

We continued upward through a thick grove of young ironwood trees, their needles brushing against us with every step.

Eventually, the stair ended and the trail proper began. Occasionally we had views of the houses below. The racket of crowing roosters stayed with us, though. It seemed like half the houses in Kalihi Valley had chickens, and they were all wide awake and noisy.

We came across a big concrete water tank, overgrown and covered with graffitti. Chris decided to climb to the top to take a look…

…only to find Roger flashing a shaka at him from across the tank top!

It turned out that the trail climbed up and around the side of the tank, so it hadn’t really been necessary to climb the tank to get a view of its roof.

We continued through heavy undergrowth of Formosan koa, with views of Kamanaiki Valley to the east…

…and Kalihi Valley to the west.

Compared to some of the other trails I’ve been on, Kamanaiki is fairly “weedy”; it’s overgrown with alien species, both plant and animal. There was ironwood, and strawberry guava, and Formosan koa, and two kinds of eucalyptus — swamp mahogany and lemon gum. We also saw a lot of this creeping vine, which looks like a relative of the passionfruit and the banana poka, except with really small flowers.

There was also a brown anole, a lizard that I had heard of but hadn’t seen myself before. They’re about the same size as, or maybe just a little bit bigger than, the green anole, our local chameleon. This particular fellow was either completely fearless, or sick. He didn’t move at all when I took this shot from just inches away.

After about two hours on the trail, we got to a grassy, mostly flat strip of ground overlooking Kalihi Valley, where we decided to stop for lunch. Native plants like uluhe and ‘ōhi‘a and koa had started to show up. Leafing through Ball’s Hiker’s Guide to Oahu afterwards, it looked like we chose a good place. I think we were at Ball’s “point C”, the first good vantage point.

Just beyond this grassy area was a hill that had a steep exposed spot with a great view of the valley, but darn it! my camera battery gave out and I wasn’t able to snap the vast panoramic shots that I love. I did manage to get a few more images, though, by powering the camera on and taking a shot in the couple of seconds before the camera automatically powered back down, then waiting a few minutes and repeating. The last few houses in the back of the valley were in sight, and behind them a linear gap in the trees gave away the unseen but audible presence of Likelike Highway.

Past that point, the trail continued, heading down a saddle and eventually all the way to the Ko‘olau ridgeline, but today we were satisfied and turned back. Another great day out in the mountains!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 3:48 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.