Almost Paradise

Last Sunday I hiked the Lanipō Trail, above Kaimukī. It’s been almost two years since my first time on that trail, and more than six months since the last time I did a Koʻolau ridge hike. Oh, my aching thighs. For the next three or four days I winced as I climbed up and down stairs, and when I got into and out of chairs.

It isn’t officially named the Lanipō Trail, actually. To be technically accurate, the trail follows Mauʻumae Ridge; the peak of Puʻu Lanipō stands about a half-hour’s hike to the right of where the trail reaches the Koʻolau ridgeline. But having said that, most everybody refers to it as the Lanipō Trail anyway. Even DLNR acknowledges this: the Na Ala Hele sign at the trailhead calls it the Mauʻumae Trail, but also bows to common usage by indicating that it does in fact lead to the Lanipō summit as well.

I went with a Sierra Club group of about ten hikers. We were led by Randy Ching, a cheerful guy who kept up a steady commentary as we walked. That’s him at the far right, pointing out a notable native plant.

Here’s the plant Randy was pointing to — but I can’t remember what it was. Help?

Later: Rick has graciously ID’ed my plant photos. This one is ʻaʻaliʻi (Dodonea viscosa). Thanks, Rick!

We climbed down the big saddle at the start of the trail, heading mauka on Mauʻumae Ridge. As I mentioned last time, it’s sort of counterintuitive to climb more than a hundred feet down, when your ultimate goal is to get to the 2500-foot trail summit. And then you realize that every time you climb down, you’ve got to climb back up again on the way back.

We paused to rest at the Steve Becker Memorial Bench. Steve Becker was a veteran hiker and longtime member of the Hawaiian Trail & Mountain Club. A few years ago, he suffered a heart attack and died while hiking this very trail. His HTMC buddies installed the bench in his memory in 2004. It’s a great bench.

I’m still a beginner at identifying native Hawaiian plants, but I think I’m getting better. This is ʻūlei, I’m pretty sure.

Later: Nope! It’s not ʻūlei, it’s pukiawe.

Of course, along with the native plants were many many alien weeds as well. This is Passiflora foetida, a cousin to the lilikoʻi (passionfruit) and the banana poka.

Disconcertingly, a long section of the trail was infested with red ants, from mauka of the big saddle at the beginning all the way to almost where the uluhe started. I don’t know what species they were but they looked like they could give a painful bite. Sting. Whatever. I don’t remember that from two years ago; was I that unobservant back then, or have they increased their numbers so much in just that time? No photos — I was too busy either walking briskly or stomping my feet on the ground to prevent them from crawling up onto my shoes.

Distracted and worried by the ants, I was cheered by the day’s first koa. What a gorgeous tree.

Another native plant that, I am embarrassed to say, I can’t identify. Could it be ʻiliahi (sandalwood)? They say that you can recognize ʻiliahi because the leaves always look wilted. I know we saw at least one ʻiliahi that day.

Later: Yes indeed, it’s ʻiliahi (Santalum freycinetianum).

This autograph tree stood out as an obvious alien because of its dark green glossy leaves. None of the native Hawaiian plants I know have quite that shiny surface; the glossy-leafed plants are usually Central American. The origin of its name is obvious.

Yet another native plant that I can’t remember the name of.

Later: ʻIliahi again.

We had climbed back up from the saddle and ascended high enough to start getting good views. I took a panoramic shot looking back.

We were leaving the alien plants (and the alien ants) behind, and more and more native plants were showing up. I was delighted to find naupaka kuahiwi, the mountain naupaka. Everyone in Hawaiʻi has seen naupaka kahakai, the beach naupaka — and most people here also know one version or another of the legend of the lovers separated, one to the beach and one to the mountains, now symbolized by the half-flowers of the two kinds of naupaka — but this was the first time I had actually seen its mauka counterpart.

We could start to see the summit, far ahead of us.

One of our group was Alani, a very knowledgeable Hawaiian guy, who pointed out many native plants. Alani explained that in the old days, the uninhabited upper reaches of the mountains were called wao akua, the realm of the gods, as opposed to wao kanaka, the lower-elevation realm of man. The wao akua were kapu; not just anyone could enter, and even then, you couldn’t enter whenever you pleased. You had to be there for a specific reason: to gather particular plants, to cut down a particular tree for lumber, to catch birds for feathers, etc. And when you did so, you had to give a pule (prayer) to explain your intentions to the akua and to ask permission to enter the area.

The boundary between wao akua and wao kanaka wasn’t so much based on a particular elevation, Alani said, but more by the types of plants and animals that were there. Wow, that sounded a lot like a modern ecosystem-based approach. It made me recall how on past hikes, I’d know I was truly in the high parts of the island when I could see what I have privately thought of as the trinity of the Hawaiian forest: uluhe, koa, and ʻōhiʻa lehua.

We were getting there.

Which is not to say that the alien species were entirely absent. There was this trumpet tree (Cecropia obtusifolia), which thankfully was not serving as a living ant nest, as it famously does back in Central America.

There was also Jamaican vervain (Stachytarpheta jamaicensis), a weed commonly seen all over Oʻahu.

We stopped for a break at a grassy clearing marked by a huge Cook Island pine, which led me to reflect on the intentional introduction of those pines, as well as eucalyptus and ironwood and many other trees, into Hawaiian forests in the early 1900s. Rampant overgrazing by cattle in the 1800s had left the lower slopes nearly bare, resulting in severe erosion. Government officials decided that they needed to reforest the slopes to protect the watershed and, when selecting the replacement tree species, deliberately chose trees that had little or no economic value — they didn’t want to have all their replanting efforts be wiped out by a hungry timber industry!

I’d often seen this little plant but never thought much of it. It’s called moa, like the Polynesian word for chicken, because it kinda looks like chicken feet.

There was plenty of ʻieʻie on the trail, too, climbing up the trunks of their hosts, like this koa tree.

I was surprised to see a paperbark tree — obviously an introduced species — this high up.

Another unidentified native Hawaiian plant. At least, I think it’s a native.

Later: This is ʻēkaha, the bird’s-nest fern. It’s indigenous (native to the islands), but not endemic (it’s also found in other places).

This is ʻuki, a native Hawaiian sedge. ʻUki tufts were often used as the crests on mākini, those masked helmets made from gourds that are so popular today dangling in miniature from rear-view mirrors instead of fuzzy dice or high school graduation tassels. There is a famous illustration, A Canoe of the Sandwich Islands, the Rowers Masked, done in 1779 by John Webber, the official artist of Captain Cook’s ship HMS Resolution, that shows a canoeful of rowers wearing these masked helmets.

Alani commented that many people have mistakenly identified these men as warriors wearing battle helmets. Not true. Gourds aren’t all that strong and wouldn’t effectively protect your head; and the way the eyeholes are cut you’d have no peripheral vision at all. No, mākini were used as masks to conceal one’s identity. Why? In the Webber illustration, note that the canoe also carried a kahuna holding an image of Kūkailimoku, an aspect of the god Kū. Webber made this illustration in makahiki season, during which the god Lono was ascendant and Kū was banished from the lands. The kahuna was probably a priest of Kū, and he and his men had to mask themselves because Kū was not allowed in the lands during this season.

Here’s another plant I can’t identify. (The flowering one, not the uluhe ferns around it.)

Later: The flower may be pretty but it’s an alien, and one with scary relatives. This is Pterolepis glomerata - it’s related to Miconia, one of the worst invasive plant species that Hawaiʻi faces.

And one that I think I can: hāpuʻu fern.

This is kōpiko, a native Hawaiian relative of the coffee plant. Note the big holes (piko) along the central rib of each leaf.

The trail was really climbing now. We were in the wao akua for sure.

And then Kaʻau Crater, the second-best view of the trail, came into view.

Like Āliamanu, Lēʻahi (Diamond Head), Pūowaina (Punchbowl), Koko Head, Koko Crater, and Hanauma Bay, Kaʻau was formed during the secondary eruptions of the Honolulu Volcanic Series, maybe a million years after the Koʻolau and Waiʻanae volcanoes formed Oʻahu. It’s interesting to see, on a map, that Lēʻahi (Diamond Head), Mauʻumae Ridge and Kaʻau Crater make a line, perhaps marking an ancient rift zone.

I took a half dozen panoramic shots, from different vantage points, as we ascended.

And then, of course, there was the trail summit. We had made it! We all stopped to rest, drink, eat lunch, and enjoy the spectacular view.

This view is the best reason for hiking this trail; it’s the reason Lanipō is my favorite of the Koʻolau ridge trails. With Mount Olomana squarely in front of us, our view stretched up the Windward coast as far as Kualoa, sweeping down past Kāneʻohe Bay, encompassing all of Kāneʻohe and Kailua towns, the Mōkapu Peninsula, Kawainui Marsh, Enchanted Lake (formerly Kaʻelepulu Pond), and then Bellows Air Force Station and the farms of Waimānalo.

This is a panoramic image stitched from 16 separate snapshots. Ideally, they’d all match perfectly but in reality my hands weren’t steady enough and as I turned the camera I didn’t rotate on exactly the same axis. So there are a few ghosts and blurs. Next time I’ll do better.

Being able to get to views like this is what makes me want to be a better photographer. Taking a great photo in such a gorgeous spot like this isn’t hard. Gorgeous spots like this, though, deserve not just great photos — they deserve awesome, mind-boggling photos. I want to do those.

Our lunches eaten and our bodies rested, we got up to head back down the mountain, making the long descent through the wao akua, back to the wao kanaka and our lives.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 at 12:02 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.