Not So Great Hiking Blog: Wandering Maunawili

Great book!

From back on July 5th...

Another round of bad weather canceled our planned crossing from Aiea to Halawa and meant finding something to do. My hiking parter II made the drive to the windward side and we decided to wander around Maunawili Valley. It was actually a treat for me because I got to retrace some of the routes and sites from back before this was a tourist hotspot.

Maunawili has a very rich history and unfortunately not a lot of people know how many changes it's been through. I'm not claiming to be any kind of expert but I've been reading the book "KAILUA" and it details some of the amazing stories about what has happed here over time. No, I'm not getting some kind of kick-back for hawking copies of it. This book turned out to be a heck of a lot more than the coffee table book I mistook it for when my wife got it for me last Christmas. It's filled with tons and tons of great history and legends of the entire Kailua area including Lanikai, Maunawili, ect. I don't know if it's even still in print but here's a link to the Kailua Historical Society where it might be still available.

Where the old wooden flumes were

Cat's Claw- EVIL

Anyway, the goals for our expedition were to retrace some of the old route and visit some of the old sights from back in the early 80's. We started on the Na Ala Hele route but where it crosses the stream we continued on the Waimanalo side of the bank. The old route was a little overgrown so I trimmed back some of the introduced vegetation. Here's where we ran into some nasty cat's claw. This purely evil plant is coated in sharp hooks that grab skin, clothing, and hair like combination of velcro and barbed wire. It's horrible stuff.

Following the stream we arrived at the busy falls and made a hard turn up to the flumes. I'm purposely going to get vague now but we followed the flumes across a pipe to where the old wooden flumes were. I wish I could find a picture of the old rotten, rickety, and dilapidated flume that used to stretch across the ravine. There were pieces of the support structure missing and it even leaned a little as we'd file across it one by one. Eventually it was replaced with a pipe and both ends of the bridge were removed for safety reasons. I'm not sure if it collapsed or was removed after that. In any event, there's now a metal bridge with extremely rotten wood spanning. There was no way we were going to cross it so we delved further into the valley rambling along the flumes and the stream.

II crossing the pipe

The other Maunawili Falls

Eventually we came to a pair of tunnels which we continued through for a while before taking a few more turns to arrive at my old childhood favorites, the moss slides!

The Moss Slides!

Of course I had to test both sides out to make sure they still worked.

We continued our rambling walk through the valley following the flumes, pipes, streams and whatever else caught our eye for most of the morning and into the afternoon. There's still a ton of things to visit in the valley but I'm going to hold off until I've got a list of things to see and visit before devoting a bunch of time to it. Please be mindful that anything from the main falls up is off limits.