Almost Paradise

I hiked down the Old Pali Road today with Chris, Tommy, Lillian, and Jayson. Taking our cue from an article that I found on it, we started from the Nu‘uanu Pali Lookout, which almost every tourist to Hawai‘i visits.

Standing at the Lookout, to the right you’ll see the old road stretching off around the curve of the mountain. This is the Windward section of the Old Pali Road, which was replaced in 1959 by the Pali Highway.

Even though I’ve been to the Pali Lookout dozens of times, and traveled the Pali Highway hundreds of times more, I’ve never taken the time to walk down that old road. Today, I was curious enough to do it. The road starts out in pretty good shape, considering that it hasn’t been driven on for almost fifty years. But soon enough we found signs that this wasn’t an official road any longer. For one thing, there were rocks on the roadway. Big ones.

Unlike more modern roads, the Old Pali Road was built hugging the side of the slope but typically not actually cut into it. In places it’s supported by huge concrete columns.

In fifty years, the elements have taken their toll on the road. Plants have started to crowd the old asphalt and concrete, narrowing the path considerably. The road was often narrow enough already. I had the shivers just looking at it and contemplating what it must have been like, back in the early 1900s, going up what was sometimes just a narrow one-lane road, with a cliff to your left and a hundred-foot drop to your right. Boy, I’m glad I never had to make that drive.

In several places along the way, we saw clusters of holes in the rocks, each about as big around as your thumb. I think they were the remnants of blasting holes drilled during the road construction back in the 1890s. You drilled long deep holes into the rock, packed sticks of dynamite into them, and blasted the rock away. What we see today are the ends of the holes, left over after blasting.

In some spots, the road crossed steep gullies with trickling streams down their middles. This one actually had a couple of small pools of water on the up-slope side, which Chris and Tommy checked out. Note the vertical streak of exposed black rock in the background — on rainy days, it probably turns into a raging waterfall. That would be gorgeous to see, but I’m not sure I’d want to be out on the trail on a day like that.

Looking over the outside rail of the road at that same spot, I could see the little stream beneath flowing down into the gully. The perspective was a little spooky, as I was looking straight down at least fifty or sixty feet.

By now, we had descended quite a distance. The Windward entrances to the Pali Tunnels were in view below us.

In a few more minutes, we had descended even farther and found ourselves at the same level as the Pali Highway. Cars were zooming past, their drivers probably not even noticing our presence. The Old Pali Road had run smack into the new Pali Highway. But I had read that there was a way underneath the highway, and after a few minutes of poking around we managed to find it. Some generous souls had even built a set of wooden steps to make the climb down a little easier.

We scrambled under the highway, the roar of the cars above us. It was a little disconcerting, but sort of fun.

After crossing under the Pali Highway, the Old Pali Road reasserted itself a couple dozen yards later, wider and cleaner than it had been further upslope. The lower elevation meant slightly lower rainfall, which slowed the plants down and kept them from engulfing the road as they had done up in the heights.

Shortly thereafter, we came to a junction where the Old Pali Road met up with another defunct roadway. Our directions said to take the left.

In retrospect, re-reading my hike books, I realize that what we were trying to do was to go to the waterfall in the first section of the Likeke Trail. We were looking for some “stone steps” turning off to the left of the road. But that turnoff to Likeke wasn’t easy to find! We kept on going down the road, peering into the bushes and looking for those elusive steps.

Looking up and back at the way we had come, we could see the Pali Lookout far above us. Did we really descend that far? That meant that to get to the car, we’d have to climb all the way back up there, too. Gulp!

Some of the masonry was quite old. Around Honolulu, I’m used to seeing the occasional WPA-era bridge, dated 1937 or so, but I thought that a 1919 date was pretty unusual. I wonder who E.J.L. was?

Shortly we came to a clear, level area where we took a break. Chris, eager to keep on going, continued down the trail only to find that it was blocked by a chain link fence, with what looked like occupied maintenance buildings on the other side. Hey, where was that waterfall? Obviously we had gone the wrong way.

But then, we met another group of hikers coming up the trail from the other way. We asked them where they had started from, and they told us that they had just started — in fact, we were only a few steps away from the trailhead. Whaaat? Sure enough, we followed their directions and found that we were actually only a couple dozen yards away from the trailhead they had started from: the Ko‘olau Country Club’s parking lot. What a surprise! We had thought that we were in an abandoned area a long ways away from “civilization”, but it just wasn’t so.

It made me think of how on the TV show Lost, which is filmed mostly on O‘ahu, the camera makes it look like they’re on a deserted island… but if you were to pan over just ten feet to the left, you’d probably see that they were filming next to the Ka‘a‘awa 7-Eleven or something.

We decided to call it a day; the waterfall could wait till next time. Still, on our return route, we kept on looking for those stone steps, and eventually Jayson found them.

The steps were right there at the junction, immediately next to a low stone wall and a steel post. They weren’t obvious at all unless you took a few steps into the bushes to look.

Just to make certain that we’d find them again, I tied some marker tape to the steel post. Maybe the tape will still be there next time.

After that, it was a short walk back up to the top of the cliffs to the Lookout. Another fun hike!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2005 at 10:10 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.