Bucket List: a list of dumb things you decide you’ll do before you die.

Yesterday’s great adventure was a bucket list item: a day hike from Haleakala National Park’s crater rim visitor center, elevation 9,750-feet, to the Kaupo Trailhead, 17+ miles away, at an elevation of 950-feet.

Yes, it was all downhill, and yes, downhill is really, really hard after the first ten miles.

Here, at the start: my husband Ron and I, prepared for high-elevation sun. It’s 9:30am:

Point zero: initiate
This is the first half of where we’re going:

Stage 1 complete: We’ve descended a little over 3000′ and reached the crater floor. Photo shows the next segment, a flat stretch to Kapalaoa Cabin:

Stage 2 complete: That’s me outside of Kapalaoa Cabin, with the trail continuing behind me. Seven miles done so far. It’s 11:30am.

Stage 3 complete: Ron and I at the Paliku trail junction. We’ve seen four other people since the end of Stage 1. Two we met at this junction: a couple of young men who “touched the ocean” then headed uphill, making for the summit. At this point they were beginning to question their own judgment, but I’m sure they finished before we did.

We’ve done ten miles so far. Now the great descent begins. We will see no other people until our son picks us up at Kaupo Ranch.

Stage 4: the descent through Kaupo Gap, from Paliku to the park boundary. Here’s a look at where we’re going, though this photo does nothing to show the incredible beauty of this area:

Kaupo Gap is my favorite area of the park. It’s gorgeous, with a native forest that’s recovering nicely since the goats were eradicated from park lands. It’s also incredibly hard to get to, being a ten-mile hike from the visitor center, or a six to eight mile hike up the gap on a horribly steep trail in bad condition–and of course getting there is only half the story. You have to get out again.


We’ve got a ways to go yet:

Stage 5: the descent through the cow pastures. We’ve done about 14 miles so far. There’s a fence at the boundary between the park and Kaupo Ranch. The contrast between grazed and protected lands is, of course, profound. From now on, it’s cattle pastures:

We’ve got “only” three or four miles left to go, but we are not almost there by any means. This is by far the hardest part of the hike. The terrain is steep, we’re walking on a ranch road with treacherous sections covered with rolling rock, and our downhill muscles and joints have begun to take serious notice of the abuse. Our destination looks disturbingly far away:

I put my camera away and focused on getting down without twisting an ankle.

The last adventure of the day was wading through a herd of sixty-plus agitated cattle milling around the trailhead gate. Most were cows and calves. One was a bull. I was terrified. But they stood between us and the car, so we forged ahead and got through without incident. It was around 6:30pm, and our darling son had just arrived to pick us up.

Here’s a rough map of the day’s trek:

It was an interesting and challenging day, and we get to check an item off the bucket list, but in all honesty, I’m not feeling any compulsion to ever do it again!

A few days ago the husband asked, “Do you want to help me hike supplies into Kapalaoa Cabin for my volunteer service trip?”

Kapalaoa Cabin, aka “The First Cabin” is located in Haleakala National Park, six miles in from Haleakala Crater rim. The trail starts at around 9800’ and descends to 7200’, with most of the descent in the first half of the hike. I’ve hiked in to and out from Kapalaoa Cabin many times, but never on the same day, so I figured, Why not?

It would give me a chance to take some pictures, and to try out the concept of hiking with two hiking poles.

I’ll admit that in my foolish youth I looked down on hiking poles—until a few years ago when a friend loaned me one on a long downhill slog. I was amazed at the difference it made and I’ve often used one since. But I never tried hiking with two poles.

The first thing I found out is that I cannot hike with a pole in each hand and a camera around my neck. I’ll have to look for a chest pack or something, because I can’t stand the camera banging against me. So I put one of the poles away until I got to the last, and roughest, part of the descent. At that point the camera went into the pack and I set out with both poles in hand.

By this time the husband was far ahead, since I’d been stopping to take pictures. So I set out at full speed—and with the help of those two poles I’m fairly sure I set personal records for the last leg of the descent, and for crossing the cinder flats that follow. Walking a trail through dry cinder is like walking through dry sand. The poles proved surprisingly useful in this situation, since they provided a solid point to push off.

We offloaded the supplies, and hiked out with little more than water and snacks in the packs. Overall, the trip went well—and today I have a good excuse not to work out!

Looking down Sliding Sands Trail from near the top. The trail follows the foot of the crater wall on the right of the photo.

The cinder flats, after the initial steep descent from the crater rim. This photo shows bracken fern on either side of the trail, but the fern soon gives way to a barren cinder area.

Kapalaoa Cabin, built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

Oh yeah, we have to climb out again! This is a view of Sliding Sands Trail as it ascends to the crater rim.

Now and then my husband and I actually escape from the mundane weekend world of yard work and the occasional movie and do something interesting. At the end of June we went on a hike on the dry and austere south side of Haleakala. Starting from Piilani Highway, we hiked down a jeep road to the coast, and then for some miles through the lava fields along the “King’s Trail” to La Perouse Bay (Keoneoio). The King’s Trail is an amazing story in itself, built 150 years ago over extremely rough a’a lava flows — but this blog entry is about the groves of wiliwili trees we passed on the way downhill.

This area was once dryland forest, now long gone, with only some remnant native trees left. It’s still amazingly beautiful, but sad as well. Presumably when it was forested the rainfall was higher — studies have shown that forests on high elevation island slopes do seem to affect the net rainfall. At any rate, our hike was at the end of June, in very dry conditions.

Wiliwili trees (Erythrina sandwicensis) are probably the most common of the surviving native species. In dry areas they will spend much of the year in a leafless condition, producing leaves and beautiful flowers only when there has been a good deal of rain.

On this hike, I was very keen to see how the wiliwili trees were holding up. A couple of years ago the islands were invaded by a tiny gall wasp, which rapidly destroyed almost all non-native wiliwili trees that are commonly used for landscaping. The native trees are also attacked, but I’m happy to report that the trees in the area of our hike are still holding on. Their remote location may offer them an advantage, as well as their habit of dropping all their leaves.

Wiliwilis are legumes, and their seed is a good-sized orange bean. I picked up a few from the ground under a tree that clearly served to shade cattle on a hot day — so there was no hope they would have sprouted in their native habitat. One of them sprouted right away, another a couple of weeks later, and the rest have recently taken off after I cracked their seed coats. Here is a picture of the first to grow:

The seedling reminds me a lot of the sprout in the movie Wall-E. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who walked out of the theater after that movie feeling rather depressed. Yes, the movie was cute, sweet, and entertaining, but the Earth does not recover from ecological damage like that, at least on a time scale that matters to the human species.

At any rate, I hope the gall wasps don’t figure out that I’m harboring a wiliwili nursery in upper Kula, and I hope that whitish spot on the leaf of the seedling is not the first sign of something bad.

Here are a few photos from the hike:

A grove of wiliwili trees, leafless under dry conditions

That’s me, hiding from excess sunlight, as always.

It’s an austere landscape.

A panoramic of the south slope. The lone green tree is a native, Reynoldsia, I believe. The brown leafless trees in the distance are wiliwili, though they’re hard to see at this image resolution. That’s the island of Kahoolawe in the background.