Time for another annual tradition, a collection of all the Instagram cat photos I took over the past year. These are heavily weighted toward the beginning of the year because I was trying to do a "post a photo every day" thing, which lasted until about Valentines Day, at which point work took over my life again as it seems to do every so often. Which is also why I've had a record low number of posts here this year, and why Tumblr has completely fallen by the wayside. I did manage to meet the one-post-per-month-for-the-last-14-years bare minimum at least; you might notice that the sidebar shows two posts for September and zero for August, but that's going by Portland time, and it was still before midnight on August 31st in Maui when I posted that first "September" post, which totally counts.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Koko Crater Trail
The city's position is that this is an unofficial and unmaintained trail, no matter how popular it is, so anything that falls into disrepair is going to stay that way. They've also gotten tired of rescuing tourists on the trail (according to a 2014 article) & they tried closing it to the public at least once, but soon relented due to public outcry. The trail's probably only become even more popular since then, since it was briefly in the national news in December 2015 when the Obama family hiked it. I occasionally point out that this is not a blog about politics, but I can't imagine the current White House occupant doing this, even if he could find Hawaii on a globe. As far as I know he only goes outside to cheat at golf on courses he owns.
Anyway, a few possibly-helpful tips for this adventure:
- As always, bring more water than you think you need, because you might need it. The only caveat here is that a backpack full of water can kind of tug you backwards and put you off balance, so be mindful of that.
- On a related note, keep an eye on people uphill of you if you can, so you can get out of the way if someone slips & starts tumbling toward you. I didn't see this happen but have seen news accounts of it happening.
- It gets hot, so go early if you can. When I say this, I always mean you should go earlier than I did, since I'm kind of hobbled by not being much of a morning person.
- Once you're done, you will probably be in the mood for a cold beer or two (or so). And you're in luck: A few blocks from here, at the Koko Marina Center minimall, there's a Kona Brewing brewpub, with a range of beers on tap and a fairly standard brewpub menu with burgers and so forth. Overall it's not my absolute favorite among all local breweries, but you can't beat the location.
Koko Crater Botanical Garden
Next up we're visiting Oahu's Koko Crater Botanical Garden, in suburban Hawai'i Kai east of central Honolulu. I seem to have made a project out of visiting all the tropical plant gardens on the island, which I guess is fine since there really aren't that many of them: Five run by the city-county government, one by the local university, and a handful of other assorted ones. This one is fairly distinctive in that it's located inside the crater of Koko Crater, the steep volcanic cone that looms over Hawai'i Kai. I wasn't really expecting a lot from the place, given a lot of reviews I'd read of it, but I really enjoyed it; it focuses on dry-climate plants from Hawaii and around the world, including some deeply strange plants from Madagascar. Maybe this just isn't what people are expecting to see in Hawaii, but the whole state is a collection of endlessly varying microclimates, from some of the rainiest places on earth to arid desert conditions and high-altitude moonscapes, so it shouldn't be surprising that plants you might associate with Arizona also grow really well here (but maybe not at all a quarter mile away). Don't miss the plumeria grove if the trees are blooming, and remember to bring bug spray; mosquitoes ate me alive while I was here & I didn't realize it until later.
If you look up toward the rim of the crater you might notice tiny specks of people looking down at you. There's a trail up to the top, which I'll cover in the next post since a.) you can't easily get to it from the botanical garden, and b.) I did that trail on a later trip, well after visiting the garden. During the garden visit I had sort of concluded the trail looked insane and I'd probably never attempt it, but a bit later I did it and it was fine, and I hadn't quite gotten around to publishing this post yet so I didn't have any hasty opinions to walk back. I suppose that's one of the rare advantages to my somewhat... slothful approach to getting posts out the door these days. Hey, I take wins where I can find them.
Pu'u O Hulu
In the previous post, we did Oahu's famous (and crowded) Lanikai Pillbox hike. This time around we're doing a similar but much more obscure one. Pu'u O Hulu is an isolated ridge on the leeward side of the island, separating the towns of Nānākuli and Mā'ili, and like many elevated areas on Oahu near the ocean, it has several WWII-era pillboxes on top. The location is pretty remote (by Oahu standards) if you're coming from Waikiki or central Honolulu, which is probably why it isn't swarmed with tourists; I think the long bus ride through the suburban sprawl of Kapolei took longer than the actual hike. This spot did gain a bit more prominence some years ago when one of the pillboxes was painted pink for cancer awareness, and since then it's become known as the "Pink Pillbox Trail".
A couple of quick trail advice tidbits: First, this part of the island doesn't get a lot of rain, so the trail is dry, rocky, and has very little shade. So use your sunblock, wear actual shoes (not slippers/flip-flops), and bring more water than you think you're going to need, because you'll need it. Second, the trail climbing up onto the ridge is steep but not scary if you have a heights issue. The only part that got my occasional heights anxiety thing going (which is really more of a heights plus no handholds thing) was the part after the first pillbox, where the top of the ridge is quite narrow with nearly-sheer drops on either side, and a steady wind constantly pushes you toward one of the edges. That part wasn't my absolute favorite, and if you don't like heights it might not be your favorite either. In any case, I gritted my teeth and got through it and it was fine. I keep hoping that if I do this enough, the primitive lizard part of my brain that overreacts this way might finally get a clue that it's fine, I'm being careful and know what I'm doing, and it was fine all those other times, and sending out a jolt of adrenalin right now is really not helping, thanks. It hasn't exactly worked yet, but I still hope it might at some point.
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Lanikai Pillboxes
Next up we're doing the Lanikai Pillbox Trail, along Ka'iwa Ridge in Kailua, a suburban beach town on the windward side of O'ahu. You're hiking from close to sea level up to a series of WWII pillboxes along the top of the ridge, so the initial part of this trail is fairly steep. But it's also a very short hike with amazing views, so it's usually packed with people; by some accounts the first couple of pillboxes are the most popular Instagram spot in all of Hawaii. I have no idea whether that's true, or how I'd go about finding out, but it seems at least believable. The trail continues on along the ridge top after the second pillbox, curving away from the ocean, and the crowds quickly thin out after that. I did the full length of the trail, which ends up at a second trailhead on Kamahele St., just outside the gate for one of those gated communities built around a golf course. I did meet a handful of people on this part of the trail, mostly going the other direction, like maybe they were taking the back way to the pillboxes. There was one group of Japanese teenagers that I remember quite clearly, not because of the serious hiking gear they had, or the very polite way they asked me to verify they were going the right way, but because one of them was lugging a boombox along, blaring dubstep of all things. Dubstep has never struck me as ideal hiking music, exactly, but whatever gets you up the hill, I guess.
I haven't seen anyone else remark on this, but there is one spot along the trail where you can (and I did) take a wrong turn. On the map above, see the little kink in the trail where it stops heading south and heads due west to the second trailhead? At that point a side ridge joins on to the main ridge, and it's big enough that an unwary hiker might think it's the main ridge and continue along what certainly looks like a ridgetop trail, albeit not as well maintained as the previous parts of the trail. I think I went a few hundred yards in that direction before checking GPS and noticing I was nowhere near the official trail, and was pointed directly away from it, and decided to backtrack. It was a nice and scenic bit of trail, I have to say; I just have no idea where it goes or how long it is, and the fact that it appears to head straight toward a nearby Air Force base was a real disincentive to go blundering around aimlessly in that direction. I've searched the interwebs since then to see if anybody has at least mentioned this deceptive little side trail, but I haven't come across anything like that so far. If anybody out there knows, feel free to leave a note in the comments below; I'd kind of like to know where I would have ended up if I hadn't had that gut feeling I was headed the wrong way.
Updated (12/15/19): Ok, I found a couple of old pages (as in, circa 1997) about the side trail I briefly wandered off onto. Seems the trail heads along the side ridge back toward the ocean, going over Pu'u o Lanikai and ending up at Wailea Point. So apparently it's fine, or at least it was 22 years ago, in the previous century, before 9/11 happened or Instagram existed. Those are the only references I've come across, so I'd still be interested in knowing whether anything's changed since then. Anyway, those two pages are linked from the author's old-school home page, which says it was last updated in April 2001. Surviving home pages from the early interwebs are a rare species these days, and I feel kind of nostalgic wandering around his site; I see at least one Gopher url so far, and one of his hike reports (dated 1995) mentions asking for advice on Usenet (!). I mean, some would argue that surviving personal blogs from the mid-2000s (like the one you're reading now) are also weird relics of a bygone age. I do kind of miss those days -- less surveillance, fewer walled gardens run by vast mega-corporate monoliths, fewer Nazis, almost no Russian or other state-sponsored trolls. I imagine today's net will also be a weird bygone era at some point, but I have no idea what's going to replace it (hence my ongoing non-billionaire-ness). I just hope it's not even worse.
