Wailua Headwaters

May 27, 2008 | In Hiking, Waterfalls | 6 Comments

I wish we knew what the Hawaiians called this place at the foot of Mount Waialeale and Kawaikini, now called the Blue Hole. That name was invented recently by haoles, but I don’t like it because it’s inaccurate and not lyrical. Nor is it the Waialeale Crater, as another purist points out, because it was not the site of an eruption, though it may be the gorge that has eroded out from under the crater.

To further complicate matters, people are starting to call the terminal cliff a “weeping wall,” which is just too lyrical.

Whatever it’s called, it’s a very unique place where a river springs forth at the bottom of a cliff 3000 feet (roughly 1000 m) straight down from the highest point on the island and carves a deep but short canyon out into the eastern lowlands. It’s also a very difficult hike combining 2 miles of slippery boulder hopping and 1 mile of difficult route finding. But it’s always an incredible trek, and I finally took a camera on this hike to share the experience. But first …

WARNING: crossing rivers, boulder-hopping, and swimming in waterfalls are dangerous activities. Rivers can flood quickly and may sweep you away easily or to trap you on the other side. Waterfalls sometimes carry rocks and branches with fatal consequences and the nearby cliffs are unstable. Hiking where there is no trail is also dangerous due to steep slopes and drop-offs. Exercise caution and proceed at your own risk.

For this hike, you’ll need tabis, felt-soled shoes sold at fishing supply stores. The best kind are the black and gray kind that look like little boots–the green sock-like ones are too flimsy. Other water shoes may work but will all slip to some extent on the wet and slimy rocks.

The forest road from the Wailua arboratum ends at the weir at the entrance to the gorge. From there, you just follow the river, alternatively hopping over boulders and walking in the water. Sometimes, there are little side trails in the forest, mostly on the right side as you make your way upstream.

As you progress, you get the feeling you’re entering a very special place, isolated from all the rest of Kauai.

While the forest road passed through groves of replanted foreign trees, a lot of the vegetation here is native, starting with the colorful ‘ohia lehua. I don’t know if it’s true that picking its flowers brings rain, but I do know I didn’t pick them and I didn’t have rain. After what seems like a long time, you reach the first waterfall on the river. Up until now, you’ve seen a few waterfalls on the side walls, but now you have to start climbing over and around them. And you’re only one third of the way there, the easy third.

But what a waterfall it is, with two streams falling into the same pool, and a third flowing in from a narrow gorge, off to the left not visible in the picture below. I call this the three-way convergence, but I’d be open to a better name. The right-most waterfall is fed by the falls you can see above it.

After climbing over the first waterfall, you follow the middle stream of the convergence, which is actually a sidestream to the main stream that carved the gorge. It has some nice little pools and falls of its own, as it collects various runoff coming down the wall to the right side. As you climb over these falls, you get a view of the main waterfall feeding this stream from the top. At around 300 feet, it is probably the most prominent waterfall in the whole gorge.

Now you leave the side-stream and begin the last third of the hike, climbing over several small ridges towards the back wall. From the first ridge, you get a great view of the inner gorge (above). Looking backwards (below) you can see a 4-tiered waterfall, the one that fed the rightmost falls at the 3-way convergence. This picture also shows one of the helicopters that came in to hover for a few seconds and fly back out.

Over another ridge and you can finally see the destination of this adventure, the springs at the back wall that are the headwaters of the Wailua river.

As we finally got close, we had a single ray of sunlight shine on the waterfall making it sparkle.

Of course, I had to go up and touch the back wall, as far as you can go upstream. It just boggles the mind to think that this is probably the oldest rock that you can touch in Hawaii (unless you have a permit to access the Northwestern Hawaiian islands). I like to stand there and imagine a timelapse movie of the rock’s existance: erupted and solidified when the island was half as old as the Big Island is now, covered over by thousands of layers, laying beneath a mountain until tremors and water carried away half the mountain to the lowlands. All that and the rock is only 4-6 million years old, the blink of an eye on the geological scale of the contients.

Also, you can now see the scale of these falls, which are about 40 feet high and 80 feet wide. Most of the water comes from springs above the nearest ledge, some from springs higher up, and a small trickle from all the way at the top of the mountains. Looking up, you can almost see the top, at least the top of the drainage coming from near the summit.

On the hike back, I was less distracted by the waterfalls and focused on the faint path that led over the ridges. It was easy to get lost in places, but the occasional trail blazer proved to be reliable.

Even so, the worn path is not easy, here going up a very steep incline with only a few hand and footholds. More dangerously, the path crossed above some small gorges on tiny ledges half hidden by vegetation.

Finally, if anyone knows of the Hawaiian name for the Wailua gorge and back wall, please share it because I would love that it be reinstated. “Headwaters” translates as Waipo’o, which is the name of the waterfall at the head of Waimea canyon, I doubt it’s just coincidence that both languages have the same imagery.

The fine print: The information and photos in this article are for illustrative purposes. For example, some photos are taken from side trails, so you can’t rely on them to find a route. If you do not have extensive off-trail and backcountry experience, please find a local guide or hike on a maintained trail.

The Tamba Island

May 24, 2008 | In Journalism, Kauai Style | No Comments

I’m always intrigued by the variety of stickers you see plastered on signs around Kauai, a sort of local graffiti. They’re usually surf-related, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what they mean. This one was self-explanatory, but very cleverly placed:

Tamba is a small surf shop on the main highway, north of downtown Kapaa in the same plaza as the Kojima store. I first noticed it when they celebrated surfer Andy Irons’s world championship victory with a window painting that said “Andy, you da man!” (I wish I’d gotten my picture with it). I didn’t know anything more about it until I read an article in this week’s Kauai People weekly. Apparently, Tamba is the owner’s middle name, originally the name of a tribal chief in Kenya.

By the way, the Kauai People weekly paper is a great source of local news. It is owned by the Honolulu Advertiser, but they have local journalists, for example Kauai Eclectic blog writer Joan Conrow is a frequent contributor and wrote the Tamba article. They always have stories about 2 or 3 local people, usually small-business owners, volunteers, and other people who make a difference on the island, as well as local events and festivals. Residents get the paper in their mailbox every week, but it’s also available online.

Grüsse aus Österreich

May 10, 2008 | In Tourism | No Comments

Greetings from Austria. Posting has been light on the blog, and now I am on vacation visiting my wife’s family in Europe (*). I had prepared a few photos of Kauai to post remotely, but I haven’t even gotten around to those yet. But a friend on Kauai said he wanted to see my pictures of Austria anyway, so here you are. I’m going to spare you the details about the strange toilets and the cool little cars and stick to what I know, the great outdoors.

Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kaua’i anymore, and it doesn’t look like Kansas either. This is the flat land around Vienna:

I love the landscape of Europe, where in most cases, houses are still clustered into towns, the fields in between are still farmed by local farmers with a variety of crops, and patches of forest remain, harvested for wood and accessible for hiking and biking.

Springtime is a great season to visit, there are flowers everywhere. This is the little town where my wife grew up and where her parents and many of her friends still live. Those are solar panels near the church, they date back to the 1980’s when the town installed a lot of solar demonstration projects. Like most of Europe, the town is an odd mix of old and new, sometimes it looks good, sometimes it doesn’t.

Not all people live in villages, the countryside is dotted with small hamlets and houses. I thought the new houses were built by city dwellers moving to the nearby countryside, but my wife assures me they belong to the well-to-do farmers and their families who work the adjacent land. One detail I noticed is that they’re always by a country lane, not in big fenced-off yards or private estates. This photo shows a Maypole which the local volunteer fireman of each town erect and decorate as a sort of fundraiser.

In between all the fields, forests, and farmhouses, there is a network of country lanes, dirt roads and forest paths that are ideal for biking. One day, I went for a 15-mile ride with my 80-year old father-in-law and I think we saw more hikers and bikers than cars. And with only one exception, every paved road, no matter how small, is in such great shape you could rollerblade on it. And in between the villages and farmhouses, there are roadside shrines and chapels. Austria used to be a very Catholic country, and my theory is that the religion took some of the edge off the Germanic culture, in a good way. Nowadays, like all over Europe, the churches are mostly filled with older people.

Because it is springtime, everthing is green here. Not the deep, lush green of Kaua’i’s North Shore, but the exuberant green of new leaves in the bright sun. The hillsides are filled with yellow and white flowers, but I must confess, I didn’t hear the sound of music anywhere.

Actually some of the green hilly pastures remind me of the beautiful backroads on Kauai, specifically that little green valley you go through on Kainahola road between Kawaihau and Hauiki roads, inland of Kapaa.

Here in south-eastern Austria, near the city of Graz, these are the foothills of the Alps, and from the hilltops you can see the higher mountains to the north. Even though I’m not an islander by birth and I’ve lived in the mountains before, I was still surprised to not see the ocean and instead see the rolling land extend out to the horizon.

One day, we drove to the mountains, up to about 3500 feet, about the same altitude as Kokee. From there we could see the real mountains even further north and still covered in snow. This picuture shows a traditional wooden farmhouse and the lower hills back to the south.

Like the biking trails, there are countless hiking trails throughout the country. Many of these are networked into cross-country routes with clear signage all along the way. Up in the high mountains, you can hike from hut to hut, where you get a warm meal and a soft bunk bed every night. Here in the lowlands, you hike between inns and guest-houses, and even if you’re just day-hiking, it seems like there’s a outdoor café or restaurant at the end of every hike.

We went for a hike in a small gorge carved through some layers of limestone by a stream coming down from the nearby mountains. Behind me, you can see the trail marker painted on the rock, three stripes of red, white, and red that mimic the Austrian flag.

You almost never have to ford a river on these trails, and indeed there were several bridges to cross the stream whenever it was impossible to continue on one side. I heard the bridges were washed out in a flood 3 years ago and rebuilt the same year. This year a windstorm knocked down hundreds of trees less than 3 months ago, and the trail was already cleared by chain-sawing the trunks or rerouting the trail around them.

Somehow, this photo sums up many of the small details I liked about Austria: along one section of this cross-country trail, at a junction deep in a scenic ravine, the sign on the left clearly maps out a side trail up to a hamlet, while the sign on the right invites the hiker to eat at the small restaurant there, “only 45 minutes away.” Further up the side trail, another sign for the same restaurant advertises the menu.

I know I’ve made a lot of comparisons that sound unfavorable to “how they do things back home” on Kaua’i, but it’s hard not to like Austria, and as a visitor I only see the good things. I know from my in-laws that people here have to work hard to preserve what they’ve got, and from what I can read in the newspapers, politics here are like politics everywhere.

(*) True story: when I met my future wife in California, she always used to send mail home addressed as “Austria/Europe.” I have never had any post office anywhere mess up my mail in any way, so I thought she was being obtuse. But she said that she started writing addresses that way when a birthday card she had sent arrived a month late and postmarked through Australia.