Whoa! That Last Step is a Doozy!

In July, I pondered if I had anything left to blog about as far as notable adventures were concerned as their frequency had dramatically fallen off and I pondered life as a local.

Yay! I do now.

 I just wandered over to Kaua'i for ~ 10 days.

But before we begin, first a little remedial Hawaiian Island geology:

The Hawaiian Emperor Island Chain is a mostly underwater archipelago that stretches over a vast area of the north Pacific and includes brand new islands, dead and dying islands, atolls, reefs, shallow banks, shoals, seamounts etcetera.

The particular energy source that causes these islands to exist, emanating from the center of the Earth, is a stationary and poorly understood "hotspot" in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (there are others, most notably the one under Yellowstone National Park). Imagine if you will, a gigantic geological blow torch. As the Pacific tectonic plate moves northwest at a speed of ~4 inches a year, the heat from the hotspot melts the oceanic crust and sends up a pyrotechnical show, lava, eventually creating the roots of the islands on the ocean floor miles below the surface. As layer upon layer pile up, the new land breaks through at sea level and continues to build up and up creating mountains thousands of feet in the sky

Alas, the impermanence of life being what it is, all good things must come to an end.

 As the islands move northwest off the hotspot, the volcanoes become extinct and their weight helps them sink further back into the lithosphere, speeding up the erosion process through wave action and rain.

Kaua'i is about 5 million years old and last erupted about 1.5 million years ago; whereas where I live, on the island of Hawai'i, has parts that are 5 minutes old. Where I used to live in Virginia, some rocks are billions of years old. Ain't no new rock being made currently in the Old Dominion,

Anyhoo, the volcanic island slowly erodes in such a way (and how awesome is that erosion evident on Kaua'i?) that it becomes an atoll and in due course sinks below sea level, henceforward known as a seamount.

In due course, Hawai'i will suffer the same fate as Kaua'i and the hundreds of other seamounts as they
follow a successively older and older path towards their doom. As they are subducted back into the Earth at the Kure Atoll near the Aleutian Islands, they become part of the Earth's ultimate recycling system and are melted into magma again and will reappear as lava somewhere else, some other day.

Not to worry about running out of islands though. Lo'ihi, about 20 miles southwest of Hawai'i, is currently erupting onto the seafloor, and if geological processes continue as they have for the last tens of millions of years, this next Hawaiian island will break sea level in about 30,000 years.

Which is a long and winded way to say that this geological death dance leads to many cool things on Kaua'i; white sand beaches like this being one of them. Maybe the home of surfing is another.

As the islands settle and sink back into the Earth's mantle, coral reefs form on the collapsed margins over tens of thousands of years. These reefs produce some of the famed North Shore's surfing shown here at Hanalai Bay. The reefs enter their own death dance as wave action erodes the reef creating white sand. The Hawaiian Parrot fish eats coral and poops out clean white sand as well, to the tune of 800 pounds a year per fish. Add in broken seashells and voila, you have the beaches above.

As the stacked lava layers of the islands are inherently unstable, from eon to eon there are catastrophic cliff collapses, as evidenced here at Ke'e Beach and the beginning of the famed Na Pali Coast.

So back to wandering over to Kaua'i.

We all agree that the Garden Island is beautiful. It is also ungodly expensive. After I picked up the rented and ubiquitous silver Jeep Wrangler, I stopped for a small pizza and side salad at a nondescript place. With a glass of water and a tip it was $35.

I was visiting my friends Jaime and Brendan, who I know to have been living in A-frames, RV's that never leave the property and so on for the past few years. So imagine my surprise when they directed me to their new digs and I pulled up to this baby:

Having coffee one morning while snooping watching the next door neighbor's house, I noticed that he liked to practice archery with no backstop from that upper lanai into the yard that borders the very busy Makai Golf Course.

They live here with three other roomates, two of which are golf pros at

the tony Princeville Makai Golf Club. Princeville on the North Shore, is the upscaliest of the upscale on Kaua'i (whew, where am I?)

It seems that Jaime and Brendan wonder and ponder how they pulled this off as much as I do.

This course, which also abuts their backyard and is not as maintained as the premier course, but that is reflected in the affordable greens fee. The golf pros in the house said this grandfathered course holds its own..for the locals.

This is the view from my quality air mattress in the "guest room". One morning a distraught Jaime came in and said a North Korean nuclear ballistic strike was imminent.

 Huh?

I mean what are you exactly supposed to do with that information? People took it seriously as didn't another World War start in Hawaii not so long ago?

I was at surprising peace with the thought of being vaporized in the next few minutes. I have done what I wanted to do and now I am about to become an atom again, I thought. Such action would save the cost/ hassle of somebody making funerary arrangements for me and my atoms would become a part of Hawaii.

By the way, that is exactly what I want to happen upon my departure onward to the next vortex. By whatever mundane and unremarkable crematorian means that puts my remains in a ho'ukupu and is tossed off the cliff and into the ocean, I would be most grateful. This is my last will and testament.

One day I tag along on Jaime's Zip-Line adventure. Awesome.

At some point we cross paths with Brendan, who is leading a "ride and slide" which is a horseback riding adventure coupled with a few zip-lining runs. Of the many jobs (side hustles in the local parlance) they have to have to support living in Kaua'i, one important one is leading adventures at the Princeville Ranch

Versus the "zip and dip" which I went on, 10 stations of zipping and a dip and lunch at this waterfall fed pool. Awesome again.

We three were/are avid music festival/show goers before we met, and after we met we flew over to see Leftover Salmon four nights in a row at Willie Nelson's Bar in Maui a few years ago. The word is that jam banders love to regroup in Hawai'i for the winter, before festival season starts in the spring on the mainland. They are known to show up at local venues to do unstructured shows to relax. So rumors flew about Phil and Friends, Taj Mahal, String Cheese Incident and others that have homes or hang with people who have homes on Kaua'i. So one night we wander through their posh golf club community to see Scott Law at restaurant called Happy Talk with this view:

Scott Law is musician's musician and has laid down chops with heavy hitters in the jam bluegrass/folk/hippie scene. Happy Talk was jammed that night with families in condos for the week, discussing today's zip-lining and what not with two or three squirming little rascals while eating baskets of expensive and poorly done bar food (I was really grateful I wasn't the exhausted looking parents, having been there at one time but too tired for it now).

 On top of that, there were a dozen or so giant television screens placed about, all on different networks. If one had never heard of Scott Law before, like me, one would just assume he was just a busker playing for tips in a busy pizza place. In was incongruous to hear Scott ripping through every Grateful Dead acoustic song you could imagine, while watching little Johnny sliding out of his chair to the floor, smeared in mustard and the parents not quite ready to take exhausted and cranky little Johnny back to the condo for nite-nite time.

It was also really hard not to look up at the giant screens from time to time and watch bratwurst being grilled on one channel, soccer games in Brazil on another and people surfing giant waves on an another. There were no surprise cameos but the small smattering of tie-dyed hard core fans and groupies did not seem to mind, but I left a little confused as to what exactly had taken place.

Wailua River, often referred to as the only navigable river in all of Hawai'i, but hey that depends on what your definition of a river is.

 It is the place to kayak to a fern grotto, a popular place for that wedding shot of a love that is going to last forever.

After five or six days in luxurious digs, I was ready for some ghosts.

Jaime helped me schlep my gear out to the site of the infamous Taylor's Camp  You may read up on the camp and look at pictures of a documentary at that link.

Many of the characters of this drama stayed on in Hawaii after their eviction and you can still see a few them them tottering about Pahoa. Old hippies have to retire from a lifetime of chilling/mellowing out too! Our very own Bud lived there for several years as well.

 He remembers it being a den of thieves who stole his tea.

But the gist of the story is as follows: In 1968 Howard Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor's brother, was to build his dream house somewhere near this field. Kaua'i was very rural then and the Hawaiians had seen what had happened in places like Waikiki on neighboring Oahu and wanted no part of it.

At the same time, as the Vietnam war and the ideals of Haight Ashbury were starting to go south, a group of 13 original colonists mainlanders were squatting in local parks, turning on, tuning in and dropping out. They were eventually jailed for vagrancy.

The good news is there are now new taro fields at the ancient taro sites that remain at the old Taylor Camp site.

The Hawaiians would not let Taylor build his house as the area was slated to become Ha'ena State Park (Thank god the Hawaiians had this sense of of deja vu as historically, contact with haoles had not gone well for them).

In retaliation, Taylor bailed the "hippies"out of jail and let them camp on the property. Houses were not allowed to be built on the beach, so the hippies built elaborate tree houses on the beach out of scrap and pilfered materials, escalating tensions with the locals.

If you look at the black and white pictures in the documentary, you see a group of photogenic young white people (college athletes and surfers were well represented in the first settlers) running around naked and ostensibly living free and off the land as had the ancient Hawaiians, who had lived on the site for centuries. Although they did not really do anything that earth shattering, many are quoted as saying it was the happiest time of their lives. I mean duh; what young person today wouldn't want to not work and live on the beach in Hawaii, while the mainland is politically on fire?

The reality was welfare fraud, that the cute little hippie children ran around unattended in the Hawaiian neighborhoods and due to poor sanitation and water purification policies, the hippies were constantly overwhelming the local clinic with diseases like hepatitis and staph infections. Near the end, the group had swelled to more than one hundred people. The scene had grown increasingly sketchier as disturbed Vietnam vets, teenage runaways and hard drugs arrived, which led to some locals giving the occasional ass kicking to several members of the camp.

The local Hawaiian government started putting not so subtle negative pressure on the residents to go back to where they came from, or at least go somewhere else and most drifted away. Finally in 1977, the government, fed up and pissed off, condemned the property, burned the place down and chased away the hard core squatters. Virtually nothing remains of the camp today.

When the Park Service was building today's Ha'ena State Park, they had to clear out the carcasses of 26 abandoned cars, mountains of rotting tents and other debris and piles of Heineken bottles (I am sure all this beer was bought with food stamps while living off the land).

Remember the puka shell craze of the late 70's? Well, a member of the camp made a shell necklace and gave it to Howard, who gave it to his sister, movie star Liz Taylor. Liz wore it somewhere and thus started the craze, which I remember even made it as far as the west end of Richmond Virginia.

Here is my camp on the banks of the Limahuli stream, where it leaves the jungle and enters the ocean. Taylor Camp residents once bathed, drank from and defecated in the stream. Shazam! Wonder why we all got sick, bro?

I'll bet the ancient Hawaiians didn't carry on like that, or for that matter, would have the greenest Tenderfoot Boy Scout. If you look at the pictures in the documentary, this is where the vollyball court and sauna were located.

After we had schlepped my gear through the jungle and set up my ensconcement, Jaime said "Chef, I sure hope some ghosts come to visit you tonight, 'cause right now you are the loneliest man in the world, camping on the loneliest beach in Hawaii".

Not one goddamned ghost. No ancient Hawaiians, no Taylor Camp residents.

Here is the Hanalei Pier: Around this area many a movie has been filmed. Hollywood discovered Kauai decades ago: the outdoors scenes of Gilligan's Island, Pirates of the Caribbean 4, all four Jurassic Park movies, South Pacific, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blue Hawaii, Fantasy Island and dozens and dozens more.

 Camping where the Hanalei River empties into Hanalei Bay near the pier. Free for Hawaii residents.

One day they closed the beaches because of 30 to 40 foot swells. This picture does not do justice to the size of these waves.

A little "Light in August" by William Faulkner in the hammock one day at 'Anini Beach Park.

Remember Tattoo saying "de plane, de plane" in Fantasy Island.? Well sweet reader, here is the site where it was filmed, Wailua Falls.

Entrance to the St. Regis Hotel in Princeville.



Went to the cocktail lanai at the St. Regis one late afternoon for a "three hour tour" to quote the theme song from Gilligan's Island, to watch sunset on Hanalei Bay with a view of the Na Pali Coast.The cost of admission is $25 martinis.

Kaua'i may not have mongoose and feral pigs like the Big Island, but man do they have feral chickens. In 1992 Hurricane Iniki ripped across Kaua'i destroying chicken coops and releasing domesticated hens as well as roosters bred for cockfighting.The are now the unofficial state yardbird. You can find them on every part of the island, crowing at all hours and fighting over a piece of dropped pizza at Costco.

Hurricane Iniki is also partly responsible for the explosion of growth and subsequent skyrocketing of prices on Kauai. Although Kauai has long been a favorite playground for Hollywood, rock stars and wealthy dentists, one local told me that the hurricane knocked down most everything and most everything that was rebuilt had high end customers in mind.

Mark Zuckerberg just bought a 700 acre old oceanfront sugarcane plantation and raised hackles as he promptly built a wall and filed suits against dozens of kuleanas.

Kuleanas are tiny plots of landlocked land, often with only an off grid hut on them and are often passed down from generation to generation.There are dozens of these kuleanas within Zuckerberg's property. Hawaii has a very complicated history of land ownership, that results in nobody being exactly sure who owns what.

However, I will give you three guesses as to who will have the land to himself and who will be kicked off their land once Zuckerberg's lawyers get finished with these people.

Having said that, I would rather see him live there with his family and eventually put it in some type of conservation/nature trust than have 800 condos go in there for middle class wage slaves. Rich people keep stuff cleaner as well.

The Grand Canyon of Kauai

Much of Kaua'i is inaccessible except to the most intrepid, experienced, lucky and in shape hikers. The Kalalau Trail is consistently rated as one of the most beautiful and dangerous hikes in America. Over 100 people have fallen to their deaths or drowned in it's remote beaches since they started keeping records. Who knows how many accidents go unreported. This includes the 26 year old son of a Kalani person, who was hiking the trail with friends and poof! was gone.

Best way to see the Weeping Wall is by.....helicopter!

For years guidebooks said it was not possible to summit the crater, Wai'ale'ale, which is the wettest place on earth. They recently said a pig fence has been built than *can* give you a landmark of sorts to orientate yourself. They warn of hiking through miles of inhospitable swamp in usually horrid conditions. The chances of getting lost are almost assured, even with GPS. Rescue is very difficult as you are in clouds and helicopters can't land in clouds. One of Brendan and Jaime's roommates, who is an active and athletic fellow, and has been on Kauai for twenty years, says experienced hikers set out to hike to the Weeping Wall and other remote places and are never heard from again "all the time".

I kept in mind how insulated modern man is these days. Fewer and fewer people bear witness to the raw and wonderful world that surrounds our modern urban bubbles. We go from cushy climate controlled houses, to cushy climate controlled cars, to cushy climate controlled gyms, to cushy climate controlled offices and circle parking lots looking  to save a few steps.

So when I was planning activities using the best guidebook ever  The Ultimate Kauai Guidebook and read about the hundreds of waterfalls in the crater called the Weeping Wall I thought, hey that that might be something to do.

But after 5 minutes of reading what it took, I quickly turned the page.

So when Brendan asked if I wanted to see the best sunset ever and I said "dude, I have seen a lot of sunsets, Nepal, Bali, Thailand, Key West, my deck in Charlottesville come to mind, but this one is going to be the best ever?"

But when he said it was two miles round trip, I was on the bus. We meandered through the Grand Canyon



and stopped a few times on the way, wanderin' and a ponderin', eating poke and talking about many things-shoes-and- ships and- sealing wax.

At one point during the drive we could see Ni'ihau, the Forbidden Island, seventeen miles away, the eighth of the eight Hawaiian Islands that I have maybe not explored, but at least have now looked at. I now have looked at all eight of the islands. Ni'ihau is privately owned and you need a permit or a invitation from one of the~250 families that live out there. Probably never gonna make it to Ni'ihau.

Until we arrived at the Kalalau Lookout. This is a must do stop for most people visiting Kauai, and for reason, it is on all the postcards and guide books.....'cause it is DA....

MONEY SHOT.

So we climb over that railing at the lookout parking lot and start our descent, passing several signs of DO NOT ENTER and other dire warnings.This is not an official trail, more of a hunter access trail where locals hunt pigs and goats, and is not maintained. It has just sort of turned to twilight, but hey this is a sunset hike, no? Slippery, muddy, steep, downhill and boulder-y and did I say steep?

The descent eventually flattens out. Brendan, who mind you is 37, is in great shape and does adventure hikes for a living, nonchalantly cruises ahead of me, apparently unconcerned.

However; not so fast!

The ever diligent and observant 60 year old, not in great shape, former Chef Ted notices that we are walking through a field of Uluhe. Also known as the fern of death; this hedge-like fern really loves sheer cliffs and hiding deep crevices. Because of its concealing hedge-like properties, people have literally fallen 300 feet as they step off the trail to say, let others pass by, take selfies with some berries in the background or take a piss....man, watch that last step, its a doozy.

I exit the Uluhe field and Brendan is waiting up for me near the above spot and says that if ever there was a time to be *mindful* now is that time.

Huh?

Like be more mindful than I have been for the last 30 minutes? What that really meant to me was that the joy/danger/effort ratio was about to change and not in my favor. We now walk about 40 yards over a sort of crumbly 5 million year old eroded volcanic material path 18 inches wide. The penalty for wobbliness is not a sprained ankle but death. If you were to fall out there by yourself, nobody would find you until the next Ice Age.

So BEAUTY BEAUTY BEAUTY IMAGE IMAGE IMAGE everywhere. 4000 feet, mist, hawks, waterfalls, ocean sunset, whales, whew. But I can't look at it because.....that last step is a doozy.

I also see old man Sun about ready to slip below the horizon. And I ain't doing this joy back to the Jeep Wrangler uphill, dark, steep, slippery, steep, dangerous, hedgefern hidden 1000 foot drops everywhere....with Brendan's cell phone light.

We are about 80% of the way to accomplishing our goal. The final push would involve about another steep descent and 25 more minutes in the wrong direction of safety and the Jeep with the cooler of Bud Lights.

I check out that Sun just a tad above that mountain over yonder and invoke the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Lunch? How about never? Does never work for you?

Nah, that is my  12 year old Walmart camera that people make fun of....that took these pics. On the other side of that tree is one of those doozy steps.

We reach this little glen on the spine of this mountain and I say to Brendan that by continuing we will have reached the point on the graph where the amount of joy gained by continuing will be less than the amount of energy invested (LDR)...not to mention the anxiety of the vertiginous, mostly uphill trek out, in diminishing light that is still ahead of us. So we sit there for a while, the only two people in the world. 

And I lived to tell the tale.

Best Ever.

It is called the Kalepa Ridge Trail but is known locally as the Airplane Trail; I guess 'cause one false 

move and you are gonna be flying.

I then moved into the Kauai Beach House in the town of Kapa'a. It has this nice esplanade and is a lot closer to the sights on the East, South and West parts of the island, avoiding all the traffic jams. It was also nice to walk around anonymously to the tourist bars and such and not have to drive home. 

Haven't done that since I don't know when.

As you can see from all of these pictures, Kaua'i is awesome, magical and packed with things to do. 

How does visiting/living on Kaua'i compare to visiting/living on the Big Island? 

Well, it is three times as expensive as Hawai'i for one. If Jaime, Brendan and their roommates are any example, you really have to be on the go all the time. It is much smaller and much more popular than the Big Island, so the traffic is unrelenting. There is basically only one road that circles about 65% of the island, so every time you go to do something cool, be prepared to sit in traffic and scramble for a parking place.

 Final advice for visiting Kaua'i?

 Spring for a helicopter ride.

Thanks for stopping by