kokee state park, hawaii Of course we thought about turning back, but we knew we couldn’t. Never mind that the trail had gone from bad to worse and the afternoon was getting on. We were stubborn – and hopeful.
“What’s it like ahead?” we asked returning hikers.
No one could give us the complete picture. Most had given up, discouraged by the slippery clay and the ankle-deep mud with us from the start.
So we continued, burning our way up the eroded ridgeline, lifting ourselves through a maze of exposed roots, limbo-dancing beneath fallen trees and snaking up sharply etched gullies that crisscrossed the trail.
To our left was sheer freefall, an elevator chute into open space. Yet as much as our feet hurt and our legs ached, Pihea Overlook – at 4,284 feet, the highest peak overlooking Kauai’s Na Pali Coast – lured us.
Let others settle for more scripted entertainments – running a zip line, cruising the coast, sipping mai tais at some seaside resort – we had a different idea. My wife, Margie, and I wanted to escape the tourist-industrial complex and get some red dirt in the tread of our shoes, to find a place where the ancient goddess of fire, Pele herself, was more than a twittering joke for mainlanders – and to hear what the mountains had to say.
By the time we reached the summit, a denuded crown no larger than a pitcher’s mound, we were spent. To the north lay the expansive Kalalau Valley, a complex watershed of steep fluted ridges, red cliffs, waterfalls and jungle extending 4,000 feet below us and running less than a mile and a half away to where the blue Pacific rose and fell upon the sand. To the south, as far as we could see, stretched the Alakai wilderness, the source of Kauai’s seven rivers, a forested plateau riven by deep, eroded and unseen gorges, punctuated by the summits of Kawaikini and Waialeale hidden in their eternal rainstorms.
Clouds swirled around us. We had two more hours of daylight. We needed to start back, but first we paused and listened: In the midst of it all -the gusting wind, the muted surf – we heard a deepening silence.
It sounds crazy, I know – the idea that these mountains might have something to say – and when someone first mentioned it to us, we dismissed it. But as we looked out from Pihea and watched the wisps of ragged clouds spiral in the valley below, rise up toward the sun, reveal rainbows inside their misty cores, turn silver and spectral and cyclone over the ridge into the interior, we found ourselves suddenly listening carefully.
Looking into the past
Two days earlier, we had left the genteel comforts of Waimea for five days in the mountains, a long time to be away from the more popular destinations on the island, but we were intrigued by the prospect of exploring a corner of the state that still contained glimpses of a time some 1,500 years ago.
We headed north on Hawaii 550. As we rose above the beaches and coastal headlands, a sheet of fog descended. Waimea Canyon Lookout, whose vistas are often compared to the Grand Canyon, was a monotone of gray.
We continued to Kokee State Park, which sits atop Waimea Canyon and extends north on a plateau to a ridge-line above the Na Pali Coast.
At 4,000 feet, Kokee is something of an anomaly for the Garden Isle. Here, temperatures in the winter can drop into the 40s, cabins rent for a song, trails go begging for hikers, and its vistas reach out beyond the horizon.
We had made our reservations at the Lodge at Kokee, a state-owned, concession-operated collection of housekeeping cabins near the lovely Kanaloahuluhulu Meadow in the center of the park. We had been told the cabins were rustic, but that didn’t explain the broken window, a crudely patched hole in the floor, a tapestry of peeling paint, a cracked lid on the toilet and stains in the shower.
We asked to see another, which was slightly better than the first. So we canceled our reservations and thought about cutting our trip short.
A change of plans
We wandered over to the offices of the Kokee Natural History Museum. I had spoken with Marsha Erickson, the director, the week before, and she had offered us a sweet little cottage just up from the meadow, in case the cabins didn’t work out.
Closed to the public, it usually is bustling with researchers and volunteers, but this week it was vacant.
Erickson was also the one who said the mountains had voices. Late that night, rainfall woke me from a sound sleep, and as I pulled the blankets around me, I started to get a sense of what they might be trying to say.
The next day we connect with David Kuhn. With his microphone and recording gear, he has produced two environmental CDs – amazing soundscapes and birdsong.
“Here, try this,” Kuhn said, handing me a set of headphones. He then pointed the microphone, surrounded by a parabolic reflector the size of a trash-can lid, into the forest, and the symphony began.
Leaves in the wind were violins; creaking branches, horns; a bird in close flight, drums. I tilted my head: a shama, a white-rumped shama, singing in the distance. And then, an apapane, as clear as a bell, its descending inflected trill followed by what sounded like a little burp.
We had hiked with Kuhn just beyond the eastern boundary of the park, above the Kawaikoi River, one of the many streams that begins in these mountains and cuts down into Waimea Canyon.
When we arrived in the middle of the forest, on the edge of a ridge carpeted by a maze of ululhe ferns and latticed by a skyscape of ohia trees, we sat down on the boardwalk, and waited.
“Humans are here on the planet to appreciate nature,” Kuhn told us. “No other being has the means – intellectually or physiologically – to see and discern the meaning of nature around us. Native Hawaiians knew this; this is one reason so many of their names for places are animistic.”
As he talked, a small yellow bird with a black mask hopped through the ohia branches in front of us. It was an amakihi.
“A gift,” Kuhn whispered.
Then an iiwi, a puffball of pure scarlet, darted across the gorge. Kuhn kissed the back of his hand as a way of drawing it in.
Let the forest fill you
We had met Aunty Aletha, as she is known, at the West Kauai Visitor Center. She has lived on the west side of the island for most of her 77 years.
“It is hard to say how to be in the forest,” she had said. “You have to let go of all your rubbish. You must be an empty vessel. You go up to the mountains with an empty mind.”
Her words were on our minds the morning we walked from the Kalalau Lookout to Puu o Kila overlook, a stretch of road closed to traffic and perfect for birding.
High in the snags of the red-tipped ohia trees, we watched the flittering antics of the ever-present apapane and caught the tones of shama.
On our last day at Kokee, we wanted to hike to Kilohana. Perched at 4,022 feet, this vista point peers down into the Wainiha River Valley and looks out toward Hanalei Bay and Princeville.
To get to Kilohana, you must cross the Alakai Swamp, one of the island’s unique ecosystems, a lush landscape of dwarf forests and bogs that lies on the western drainage for the island’s tallest mountain, Kawaikini, and the world’s rainiest, Waialeale.
The trail took us from a bowered rain forest, thick and impenetrable, into an open glade. We passed fields of ginger, broad-leafed ferns and toppled ohia trees shrouded by moss and lichen, its aerial roots dropping down from the fallen trunk. In the middle of the swamp, shallow water reflected a cloudy sky.
Kilohana is a small wooden platform no longer than a diving board but, mercifully, twice as wide, set on a precarious edge of Wainiha Pali. We were fortunate. The skies had stayed clear, and 7 miles away, Hanalei Bay was a white-and-blue crescent. The surf at Black Pot Beach looked as if it was breaking right, and 7 miles beyond, past the clutter of Princeville, we saw the Kilauea Point lighthouse.
On the trail back, we were bone-tired but sustained. Sunlight shot through narrow openings in the forest. The green ferns seemed to fluoresce in the understory. The plants shimmered like medallions of chrome.
I dropped back and watched Margie disappear ahead into the dappled light and shadows near the grove of sugi pines planted near the trail head. I was overcome by a sense of eternity and fragility, the feeling that our time here – in Kokee, on the planet – is limited and lucky.
This is what the mountains said to me.
