Almost Paradise

I hiked Wa‘ahila Ridge today with my coworker Roger. The trail starts at Wa‘ahila Ridge State Park, at the top of St. Louis Heights, and heads into the mountains from there. The day started out overcast, and there had been morning showers in Kalihi, so I was a bit worried about weather conditions on the ridge. But the showers passed, and although it was a bit moist on the trail, it wasn’t completely soggy up there.

We started among the Norfolk Island pines of the state park, with chickens clucking and pecking at our feet. You gotta watch out for those wild park chickens. If you’re not careful, they’ll jump you and go through your pockets looking for food. Not a good scene.

We ascended through heavy strawberry guava thickets. They were fruiting, which surprised me a little. Isn’t guava season supposed to be later in the summer?

Wa‘ahila Ridge has more exposed rock along the trail than most other Ko‘olau ridge trails. There are a number of short rocky cliffs, five to ten feet high, that have to be climbed up and down. There are usually plenty of handholds, so they’re not a huge obstacle. Actually, they’re kind of fun.

I was disturbed to come across what was, pretty obviously, a pig wallow. Damn, those wild pigs are up here too. I guess they must have climbed up from Mānoa.

Uluhe, a.k.a. false staghorn ferns. These ferns are a sure sign that you’re getting high up into the mountains. Trailsides covered with uluhe can be deceptive, as they often cover up steep drop-offs. Don’t be fooled — stay on the trail!

?

Looking back, we could see Mānoa Valley spread out below us:

To the east, I got a nice shot of ‘ōhi‘a trees framing the back of Pālolo Valley. Note the light silver-green of kukui trees in the background.

The red blossoms of this tree remind me of ‘ōhi‘a but the leaves are quite different. (Later: no, I’m informed that this is indeed an ‘ōhi‘a.)

A small maile bush.

About an hour or so in, I took another look back towards Honolulu:

Pukiawe, I think? (Later: nope. More ‘ōhi‘a.)

Some kind of sedge?

The classic Ko‘olau combination of ‘ōhi‘a above and uluhe underfoot. If we had some koa trees too, the picture would be complete.

? (Later: this one is kopiko, a.k.a. Psychotria hawaiiensis.)

Another panoramic shot looking back at Honolulu, from even further up the trail:

Another sedge?

Lest you think that the whole hike was taken up by me snapping shots of interesting plants, I should mention that there was a lot of climbing, too. As we got near the top, we started hitting steep, muddy, eroded sections. No plastic steps here; this ain’t no official Na Ala Hele trail. The next time I’m up here, I’m going to seriously consider bringing a rope to leave for the next people to use. I sure would have appreciated one in spots like this.

That white sky in the photo above should have been a clue for me, but I was completely and pleasantly taken by surprise when just one scramble later, we went over a knob and could see the Windward side. We were there!

At the summit, we could see the Windward side from Kāne‘ohe to a bit past Olomana. Kawainui Marsh dominated the center of our field of vision. It wasn’t 100% clear, as the low clouds dropped mists that partly obscured the view.

To the east was Mount Olympus, the actual end of the trail, but we weren’t in the mood to do the extra quarter-mile or so to climb to its peak.

I did go a few steps down the connecting trail along the ridgeline, though, and to my surprise found a really nice view of Ka‘au Crater to the east! Having seen this upland marsh from the Lanipo Trail, from the ridge on the other side of the crater, it was very cool to now see it from this side.

On Ko‘olau trails, my rule of thumb is to expect to travel one mile per hour. We took two hours going up, half an hour for lunch at the top, and two hours going down, so we ended up doing a six mile round trip in four hours of hiking. That’s pretty good time.

Thimbleberry?

The wind at the summit is so constant and strong that it has forced this ‘ōhi‘a tree to grow at an angle.

The twigs on this koa branch show why haole koa (or koa haole, to use the accurate Hawaiian name) got its name. The koa tree’s young leaflets are those little multi-part ones, and they look nothing like the larger, mature crescent-shaped koa leaves. Haole koa’s leaves (photo here) look a lot like the young koa leaflets, so when the Hawaiians first saw that plant, they called it koa haole, i.e. foreign koa.

These yellow-and-orange combs look like they’d be great in lei-making.

(Panoramic shots stitched together with the excellent freeware program AutoStitch.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 5th, 2005 at 8:15 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.