Great Hikes on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai %blog_title%

An Eclectic Sunrise

Tuesday, Nov 27th, 2007 by Andy | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Reviews, Weather

It’s been a while since I posted a sunrise picture, but I’m looking for a short and easy post today.

We’ve been having a bit of nice Kona weather again. Yesterday was sunny but not hot, and the mountains were spectacularly clear most of the day. With no clouds, the night was almost chilly under a waning moon . And this morning, a few cirrus high clouds were spectacularly lit by the morning sun:

The reason I called this an “eclectic sunrise” is because a relatively new blog called Kaua’i Eclectic describes the same sunrise much more beautifully than I:

I’ve been wanting to mention this blog, but I didn’t get around to adding it to the blogroll until now. It’s written by Joan Conrow, whom I do not know personally, but the story of her blog is well known. She was a Kaua’i correspondent for the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper, including recent ferry news, until she was fired for voicing her personal anti-ferry opinions on her blog. So if you’re a ferry supporter, her writing will surely rub you the wrong way.

However, if you look beyond the politics, she is a keen observer of both mother nature and human nature. She usually writes about her morning walks and the people she meets, which lead her to expose some facet of Kaua’i or lesson she has learned from living here. But she does write a political blog, and so she keenly applies the lesson to the political target du jour.

If you shun the political reading, she has also written many articles for other Hawaiian publications such as the Honolulu Weekly (a free newspaper on Oahu) and the local airline magazines. From her descriptions of places and people, you can tell she is a spiritual person. Fortunately, her writing remains poetic, lyrical maybe, but rarely preachy. For example, she has an article about the mist in Koke’e and the Hindu temple on the Wailua river. On the right-hand side of her blog, she lists her own favorite pieces, including some about the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.

And by the way, as I write this in the evening, it is pouring down rain. Update: it rained over 5 inches last night, more in one night than any previous whole month since the March 2006 deluge. And it’s raining hard again this morning.

Salt Pond Surprises

Tuesday, Nov 13th, 2007 by Andy | 2 Comments
Filed under: Beaches

We finally got out of the house last weekend for two nights of camping. This being almost winter already, we chose Salt Pond Beach Park near Hanapepe to be on the warm west side, and it didn’t disappoint. We arrived Friday evening, and put up the tent just before sunset.

We didn’t plan on doing much, but not having plans left us open to whatever came up. First was the Hanapepe Art Night, like every Friday night from 6 to 9pm. All the art galleries and shops stay open late, many have snacks or cheese and crackers with wine (or juice or water) .

There is usually a musician playing in front of one of the stores, last Friday it was Westside Smitty playing some “Kaua‘i blues, folk, harmonica and steel guitar” in front of the Talk Story bookstore. He wrote some Kaua’i-flavored lyrics to some old classics and was a lot of fun to listen to. Unfortunately, he’s off to the east coast nursing home circuit for a few months, but he’ll be back next year.

Of course, I could not resist going into the bookstore and buying a book.

We tried to eat at the Hanapepe Cafe, a casual restaurant serving simple yet creative food with lots of vegetarian choices, but reservations are a must on Friday nights (335-5011). We ended up a the local eatery next door which looked like a greasy spoon. But they were very friendly, and the food was greasy but good. And they obviously cater to vegetarians who were turned away at the Cafe.

The next morning, we got up in time to see the sun rise over the salt ponds just behind our tent. In the winter, the ponds are flooded from the rains, making it a photographer’s joy to shoot the reflections.

This was the view from our tent, looking out towards the beach. There are no marked camp-spots, but there are plenty of picnic tables, pavilions, sinks and water faucets around.

Salt Pond beach is a big crescent of sand on a rocky coastline, so monk seals come ashore to rest. This one spent the whole day on the beach without moving much, behind a rope barrier set up by lifeguards to protect the endanged animal from harassement.

From further back, you can see the sugar cane fields so typical of the west side stretching up the lower slopes towards Waimea Canyon. Since the west rim is higher, you can see most of it stretching 12 miles up the canyon.

To the right and left of the beach, an old reef creates a barrier to the incoming waves and harbors lots of tidepools. There is actually another pocket beach to the right, created by a second break in the barrier. This shallow and protected water is great for children to play in.

The most common inhabitant of the tide pools is the hermit crab.

In one section where the large pools were separated by smaller dry ones, lots of little crabs gathered for some reason known only to them. I must’ve scared them, because they all ran away when I got near. I call this movie March of the Crabs (20MB—please be patient):

Snorkeling is not spectacular, but there are some fish in the shallow rocks to the left inside the exposed rocks. The lifeguards advised me not to go outside the inlent due to strong currents in the opening. The water can be murky due to the wash over the reef, mornings are usually calmer and clearer.

You’ll see a good variety of fish, just not many of each. I saw some bluestripe and milletseed butterflyfish, some kihi kihi (moorish idol), and one Hawaiian cleaner wrasse. On a previous trip, back before my underwater camera broke, I saw this odd fish called a flying gurnard. The “wings” are spread to scare me away, but the fish does not fly:

It seems like we filled up the day just walking a little, going for a swim, and relaxing. The next day, we set out to explore around Hanapepe again.

First we went to the well-known Glass Beach near Port Allen (see if you can find the other Glass Beach on Kauai). It’s in the guidebooks, so despite the short dirt road and the industrial scenery, there were up to a dozen people collecting glass the whole time we were there.

There are tons of the glass mixed with some light sand, easily visible on what used to be a black sand beach. At least I assume it was a black sand beach from the name of the town nearby: ‘Ele’ele means dark or black.

Being November still, it was hot in the sun all afternoon, so we went shopping. Hanapepe has the only thrift stores south of Lihue, and we love to check them out.

There is a small—and somewhat grimy—Salvation Army store (turn makai next to the Shell station), and Habitat for Humanity, the house building organization, has a store in a large warehouse right near the trun-off to Salt Pond. This is the best thrift store on the island, the perfect antithesis of the other Habitat, a trendy European competitor to Ikea. In the end, we found some really cheap clothes and some good children’s books.

Back at the campground, the late afternoon sun was making the salt ponds very photogenic again:

I’m not really sure how the salt ponds operate, but I think I heard that salt water seeps in under the sand from the ocean nearby, and then it’s concentrated into smaller and smaller pans shaped directly in the red clay. The clay keeps the water from going back out, and in the end the brine dries up leaving the coarse salt crystals. The salt is scraped out of the pans and left unwashed, giving it a pinkish color, though not nearly as red as the “commercial” ‘alaea sea salt in which red clay is added to coarse white sea salt.

I believe that the Hanapepe salt ponds are the only traditional salt-making ponds remaining in Hawaii. The right to make salt there is restricted to several families, like a guild, and passed down though the generations. Additionally, this salt cannot be bought or sold by these families, only given away. In addition to seasoning, the salt is used for Hawaiian blessings and ceremonies, at least it was in the old days and I assume some people still honor the practice.

So the highlight of the weekend was receiving a small bag of the salt from one of the more-or-less homeless campers who live around the beach park. She had let us share her picnic table, we offered her some of our food and chatted with her occasionally, and by the end of the weekend she gave us some authentic local salt to take home. I suppose she belongs to one of the families or knows them well. I don’t want to make too much of the gift, but it does feel special to us.

Then a double rainbow appeared over the salt ponds:

It sprinkled a little, but not enough to get the tent wet, which was fortunate because it was time to pack up. After that, the nice sunset was a bit anticlimactic, but I won’t complain.

We stopped at Grinds Café in ‘Ele’ele for dinner. I have been dissapointed by their pizza before (too much greasy cheese), but their sandwiches and breakfast-anytime dishes were very tasty this time. Their homemade bread was so good, we took a loaf home with us.

In the end, we went to places that we knew from before, but each in its own way had something new for us. It was nearly the perfect weekend, with the right mix of rest, relaxation, and mini-adventures, right in Kaua’i’s backyard.

Overnight Hikes

Friday, Nov 9th, 2007 by Andy | 6 Comments
Filed under: Hiking

In an email, Brian asks:

My wife and I will be visiting the island for a little over two weeks from the end of December-January, and except for a couple of days at the beginning and the end of our trip, we’d love to spend the rest away from the crowds, in our tent, soaking in as much nature as possible.

We’re definitely going to do the Kalalau hike; are there other “must do” multi-day hikes on the island? If so, how would you prioritize them?

While Kauai has a vast interior mostly untouched by people, it does not have a network of hiking trails like other wilderness areas on the mainland. There are many reasons for this:

Several large valleys such as Wainiha or Olokele Canyon are private land-holdings, making them off-limits.
Other areas are too steep to create trails that wouldn’t erode.
Some areas such as the Alaka’i swamp are too fragile ecologically to support much human intrusion.
Also, the interior is much wetter than the coast, meaning the trails would be expensive to maintain and not very popular.
Finally, hunting is permitted in many areas around the island, further dissuading many hikers.

While never a pre-contact Hawaiian practice, hunting has become engrained in local culture now, either as sport or as sustenance. I’m sure that hunters outnumber recreational hikers on Kauai, and certainly they outnumber recreational backpackers. As a result, all of the backcountry campsites outside of Kalalau and the Na Pali coast are hunters’ camps, and the trails to access them are mostly used by hunters.

Only camp under the roof in case of a big storm, otherwise find a flat spot nearby

Because of the wetness factor, these camps and trails are mostly located in the Waimea Canyon area that tends to be drier. There are also a few in Kokee due to the rich hunting grounds up in the forest. These camps all have a roof shelter and sometimes a table. While many hunters use other trails on the east side such as the Powerline or Tunnels hike, there are no established camps on them.

Here are the possible overnight hikes and backcountry campsites that I know of:

The one most worth doing is to hike down into Waimea Canyon and following the river down to Waimea Town. You can do this as a 10-mile single-day hike, but staying overnight lets you break it up and have time to explore. The trail is fairly good and not difficult, but there are several river crossings so you cannot go when rains or storms will create flash-flood conditions.
When you go down the Kukui trail into the canyon, there are two camps on the Waimea river, two in the Koaie side-canyon, and one near the Waialae side-stream. Koaie is upstream, so you could hike up there the first day after setting up your tent in Wiliwili camp right at the bottom of the Kukui trail. With an early start the next day, you would catch the beautiful morning light in the lower canyon, and still reach the road-end by early afternoon.

Looking up to the west rim lit by the morning sun

From the road, it’s 2 miles to Waimea Town past the Menehune ditch and the swinging bridge, so you either have to have a car shuttle set up or take your chances hitch-hiking back up to the Kukui trailhead. You cold also camp at Lucy Wright county campground in Waimea Town and set out the next day back up to your car, either hiking along the canyon rim road, or again hitch-hiking.
There is a trail called the Mokihana Stream route on the east side of Waimea canyon, on a ridge that eventually goes up to the forest highlands. There is a cabin in the forest, called Waialae cabin on Waialae stream far above Waialae falls that are visible from the Kukui trailhead. The cabin is over 15 miles from the end of the road at the bottom of the canyon, but there are several shelters at lesser intervals along the ridge that would make a fine camp.

Waialae stream and cabin in the late afternoon, after a long day of hiking

This is an out-and-back hike, but the views will be up into Waimea canyon one way and out to sea going back. To the east is the rarely seen Olokele canyon. The only problem with the Mokihana Stream route is that it is misnamed and remains on the ridge with no access to water other than catchment tanks from the shelter roofs (water availability is therefore uncertain, and purification is a necessity).

Backcountry shelter on the Mokihana Ridge
Kawaikoi Camp and Sugi Grove are located on the Mohihi-Camp 10 dirt road that begins in Koke’e state park. They are heavily used by hunters who drive in with their trucks, mostly on weekends. It should be relatively quiet during the week, but you should double-check by calling the Koke’e museum. I believe these two camps have toilets, but you should confirm that too.
You could drive in yourself if you have a 4×4 or hike in on the road. You could also hike in or out on the Pihea trail from the 2nd Kalalau lookout or any number of trail and road combinations from the main parking lot at the Koke’e museum and lodge. Once there, you could use it as a base to explore further canyon-side on the Kohua Ridge Trail or into the forest on the Mohihi trail (be very careful with your route-finding on that one). The Koke’e museum sells a small map with most of these trails, and they should be able to give you updated trail conditions.

These camps and trails are open to everyone, no hunting permit is required. You do need a camping permit that is free and easily obtained from the state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR: 3rd floor of the state building in Lihue). Like other campsites there might be quotas, but I’ve never had trouble reserving, even for a weekend night. Anyways, they can tell you if another party, most likely hunters, have registered, in which case you may want to choose another camp to have peace and quiet.

Camping in the backcountry anywhere outside of these designated campsites is illegal, according to the DLNR. I’m sure there are many illegal hunter campsites all around the island, and I have seen places you could easily hide a tent off most of the trails. However, I don’t think visitors can plan any multi-day hikes without knowing were camping is possible, so I think it’s best to have local knowledge before trying to sneak around like that.

While hiking, camping and hunting can and do co-exist on Kaua’i, non-hunters should be prepared to respect, or at least put up with, local hunting practices. I have seen hunters shooting at goats from the trail. The worst is a habit of leaving animal carcasses to rot near campsites, not to mention lots of litter, sometimes even bags of trash. The only thing you can really do about it is look further for a tent-site, or go to the next camp. Remember, these backpacking opportunities probably exist only because of the hunters in the first place.

One last bit of advice: you can also set up a base camp at the county campgrounds, which are all beach parks, and do day-hikes on all the regular trails. That requires a rental car, but you would need to get one anyways. This is how I visited Kaua’i for the first time, what better way to discover the island than by camping at all the beaches.

Mellow Dog Needs New Home

Tuesday, Nov 6th, 2007 by Andy | 1 Comment
Filed under: Kauai Style

Update: Jackson found a great home in Kalaheo thanks to the other neighbors. We plan to go see him again sometime.

This plea is mostly for Kauai residents, but it will give a “slice of life” on Kauai to others.

Last week, our neighbor Joe behind our house died quite suddenly. He was an older man who lived alone, and when another neighbor saw his lights and TV on all night, he went to check on him in the morning, and notified the police. Joe was a kind man loved by all of us. He knew everyone on the street and introduced us to them when we first moved in. Just like that, on a sunny Aloha Friday in a tropical paradise, we were all reminded of our own mortality.

Since we knew Joe a little from being around him nearly every day, the other neighbor and I stayed around and helped the emergency personnel and the police collect information. Joe was a retired teacher from Kapa’a High School, and because Kaua’i is a small place, one of the medics remembered having him as his French teacher. I speak French and I never knew Joe taught it or we could’ve practiced together. I also learned Joe used to do a lot of hiking decades ago, but I never had the chance to ask him what Kaua’i was like back then.

Sadly, Joe leaves behind his dog named Jackson. He’s been heartbroken ever since, moaping about and not eating much. We are taking care of him so that the authorities don’t put him in the animal shelter.We take him for walks and he does respond to the love and attention that we give him, so he should be OK. But Jackson needs to find a new home before the family sells or rents out his house.

Jackson is an older dog who loves to go for walks and short runs and seems healthy. He does like to chase birds and cats, which is why we can’t keep him. Otherwise, he is very mellow and obedient, with a wonderful temperament and is friendly to all, even other dogs. He is fairly big but great around kids—he is my daughter’s best doggie friend.

If you or anyone you know might want to adopt Jackson, please email me at andy@great-hikes.com.

Wet, Wet, Wet

Monday, Nov 5th, 2007 by Andy | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Neighbor Islands, Weather

[Title with apologies to a band I never got into, but I know my college roommate liked them.]

Autumn has been gaining hold lately, with colder winds, rainy spells, and generally unsettled weather. I don’t understand weather well enough, but unsettled weather on Kauai means there are also periods when there are almost no clouds. When the sky is clear, the nights can be almost chilly in the 60’s (16-20 C), and that usually leads to rain when the sun warms the moist air. But it does give glimpses of Waialeale in the early morning before the clouds form.

But last Saturday was particularly rainy here on Kauai when a Kona storm moved through in the early morning. In the fall and winter, the tradewinds die down, and weather can come from the south and south-west, or from the district called Kona on most islands.

The morning started out clear, and looking east to where the tradewinds usually bring us our weather showed nothing alarming. Then it started getting dark again, and I saw a few grey clouds. When it really got so dark I had to turn the lights back on, I looked out south-west over the head of the Sleeping Giant and saw the black clouds rolling in. The rains came with a bit of thunder and lasted off and on all day and into the night. At dusk I saw some lightning, a relatively rare sight here in the tropics because of the humidity.

In the end, I measured 2 inches of rain by the next morning in the Wailua Houselots where I live, a generally drier slice of land close to the coast (average annual rainfall is around 50 inches or 125 cm). That’s the first rainfall significantly over one inch (2.5cm) in almost exactly a year, and the most in 24 hours since the infamous rains of March 2006.

Conclusions:

For tourists, the beginning of November is often rainy on Kauai.
For hikers, it’s wet and muddy on the trails right now, all over the island. The inland areas already got wet in October, so now they will be soggy. When the sun does come out, it doesn’t make the trail dry, it makes the air muggy.

Checking out some other blogs around the state, one of them reported this storm in real-time, and another mention the power outages in downtown Honolulu (glad to know it’s not just our rural island that suffers from these—schadenfreude). But best of all, the Honolulu Advertiser published this photo of snow on the Big Island (see also these older photos from the Mauna Kea Weather Center).