On Monday, Rebecca and I drove up to the top of Waimea Canyon and hiked the Pihea and Alakai Swamp trails. The book warned of how muddy the trail would be and how we should bring shoes we didn't care about. As you can see, we appreciate their warning.
The trail was wonderful and quite the adventure. The views when the clouds opened up were good, but limited. Today (Tuesday) is incredible weather, I wonder what the views would look like today (but not enough to swim through the mud again). All our northwest hiking in rain prepared us for this trail.
At the end of this post has pictures of the canyon itself. They call it the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific", and from the pictures you can see why.
http://www.hawaii-guide.com/index.php/kauai/spot/pihea_trail/
The tour book and the woman at the museum said the trail was "very muddy for the first mile, until you hit the boardwalk". We took the following picture to show how great we had been staying (relatively) clean getting to the boardwalk. Unfortunately, it was only a 30 foot long stretch of the boardwalk, and we had alot more mud to travel before getting to the real thing.
I didn't take a photo at the beginning of the "real" boardwalk, but I did take a photo of our feet when we turned around (we had set a time to turn back, and we stuck to it. The days are much shorter here compared to the northwest, and it goes from "day" to "night" much quicker because the sun plunges straight into the water instead of lingering at the horizon forever as it does in Seattle)(also, I had brought a great little flashlight all the way from home, but left it at the hotel). As you can see from the photo, we didn't stay clean the whole time.
This was taken very early in the hike. Look how spotless we were.
This is Waimea Canyon.
This is the Grand Canyon (in Arizona) for comparison.
No comments:
Post a Comment