Pololū Valley
Started: 2025-02-01 15:34:39
Submitted: 2025-02-01 19:20:26
Visibility: World-readable
Hiking into a scenic valley; shaved ice above the ocean; driving a jeep with the top down; seeing the sunset and stars on the side of Mauna Kea
On our last full day in Hawaii, we drove to the northern edge of the island for a short but scenic hike into the Pololū Valley.
To get to the trailhead we drove to the north shore of the island, through several microclimates along the way (hot and dry in the immediate vicinity of Waikola Village; scrubland of low dry grass and widely-spaced trees on the highway north; wetter and greener on the north side of the island as we exited the rain shadow). We drove through a couple of small towns until we reached the trailhead at the end of the road, perched dramatically on the edge of a deep valley dropping all the way to the ocean.
There was limited parking at the tiny lot at the end of the road so we were directed to find parking off the side of the road, which proved much easier than I expected; someone must have just left because I found a suitable parking space within sight of the trailhead. (Cars were parked on both sides of the road going back at least a quarter-mile.) We got out of the car, applied sunscreen (I finally relented when I discovered that the legal-in-Hawaii-County mineral sunscreen Kiesa found was not as bad as I expected), and waited for Tristan and Caleb to show up. They had dropped off Jessica and were apparently trying to park but they seemed to take much longer than any of us expected just to go park the car. As a result of our extra wait we heard the spiel that the staff at the trailhead were giving multiple times: only the beach is open, there are no restrooms, there are rangers writing tickets to people who don't heed the restroom warning. At length Tristan and Caleb arrived and we began our descent down the short steep trail into the valley.
The dusty trail descended 300 feet in a quarter-mile on multiple switchbacks clinging to the wall of the valley. Large shrubs and small trees perched on the valley wall provided some shade from the warm winter sun.
At the switchbacks closest to the ocean we got a view of the small beach below, tucked in between the tree-covered walls of the valley, with ocean waves breaking on the beach. The rugged north shore of the island faded into the distance in the haze beyond. This was a spectacular place, unlike anything we'd seen in our week on the island, but very little of it was open and accessible. The valley floor, and a chunk of the adjacent valleys repeating to the east, were privately owned and closed. Much of the upland area was owned by the state forestry department and closed to the public.
This, I realized, was the one thing that would turn me into a communist: the promise to expropriate large private land holdings in scenic areas and turn them into public parks. (But in practice what would really happen is that the fundamentalist greens who controlled the land board would instead turn the land into closed preserves and no one would have access. Ask me how I feel about the closed areas labeled "open space" back home in the Santa Cruz Mountains.)
Soon we reached the valley floor, where we walked through a narrow forest of ironwood just above the beach below the lagoon in the wide flat valley. On the other side of a stream bed the small forest climbed sand dunes that, we were told, concealed burial sites for Hawaiian royalty.
The beach was a narrow strip of dark sand between cliffs on either side. Further down the beach the sand turned into cantaloupe-sized lava rocks. Large waves broke on the beach. We had been warned against swimming in the ocean (there was no lifeguard so there would be no rescue, only recovery) but people were in the water anyway.
We took a couple of group photos in honor of the family who ended up unable to attend our week-long family trip to Hawaii. Once my obligation was complete I walked to the end of the beach (it wasn't far) and looked back at the beach and the frothy white waves coming in from the perfect azure ocean.
We left the beach after forty-five minutes, giving me one last chance to look up the valley fading into the hazy distance to wish that more of the valley were accessible to the public (and that the state forestry department had decided to provide better visitor's facilities; though given the lack of public land at the bottom of the valley they're probably making a reasonable choice to try to limit visitors by not providing more facilities).
The hike out of the valley was easy enough. When we reached the car we drove to the nearest public restrooms at Kēōkea Beach Park, seven minutes away; then headed to Fresh Off the Grid, a small outpost in what looked like an overgrown food truck set up on a field of mowed grass overlooking the ocean serving food, local produce, and shaved ice.
We ate shaved ice, which was delightful.
While we were eating I plotted to drive back to the condo with top down on my rental Jeep Wrangler. It was easy enough to open the latches above the front seats and push the top back, but then it wasn't immediately obvious how I was supposed to stow the soft top once it was retracted. There was a tag dangling from one of the struts supporting the soft top with a QR code linking to a video that gave some help; though it seemed to give me the option of removing the top entirely (which was not a good idea for my circumstances, since I intended to make a one-way drive back to the condo from our current location) or leaving the rear strut attached to the rail at the top of the roll bar and tying the struts together. (This was easier once I realized that I could take off the side and rear window panels, but then I had to stow them in the now-open trunk.) The manual implied that there ought to be velcro straps provided to tie the struts together, but I didn't find them, so Tristan offered shoelaces from the shoes he wasn't currently wearing.
Kiesa rode back to the condo with Jessica and I drove with Tristan and Caleb in addition to my children. Before we pulled out of the parking lot onto the highway I gave strict instructions to keep all hands and arms and other body parts in the vehicle at all times (basic roller coaster rules); and then we spent the next half-hour of the drive with the boys (mostly Caleb) rules-lawyering various increasingly-ridiculous scenarios that eventually escalated to alien abductions to test the limits of my rule.
On our way out we stopped by a large statue of King Kamehameha in front of the North Kohala Civic Center, who had apparently grown up in one of the valleys to the east before claiming the throne of the island of Hawaii and launching a military campaign to unify all of the Hawaiian islands under his rule. This particular statue was commissioned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Captain Cook, but it was shipwrecked off the Falkland Islands and believed lost. A replacement statue was commissioned with the insurance payout and placed in the originally-intended location in Honolulu, but the original statue was salvaged and sold to the Hawaiian government who installed the statue here.
I took an alternate route back to the condo, which was more direct but slower, heading up and over the shoulder of the Kohala volcano forming the northernmost tip of the island. This took us through the grassy upland areas on the leeward side of the volcano, which looked like they were less affected by the rain shadow than the highway by the coast. We drove the entire hour drive back to the condo with the top down, which was an interesting experience, though the windshield substantially blunted the force of the wind so it was mostly when I looked up that I remembered that there was nothing above me but sky.
I put the top back up when we reached the condo, carefully returning all of the window panels to their right places and returning the top to its full upright and locked position.
We ate an early supper then headed to the visitor's center at 9000 feet on the side of Mauna Kea. My plan was to arrive in time to watch sunset at 17:59, then hang out until astronomical twilight at 19:17 (at which point the sky would no longer be lit by the sun) at the beginning of peak star-gazing time. The top of Mauna Kea is surrounded by astronomical observatories because the mountain air is famously clear, so I hoped we would be able to see interesting stars from the top.
When we left the condo to begin the drive to the visitor's center, high clouds hung in the sky, obstructing our view of the mountain. By the time we reached the saddle between Mauna Kea and its neighbor Mauna Loa the clouds were behind us, and as we climbed the paved access road we could see the clouds below us. We arrived at the visitor's center parking lot with only a few minutes to spare before sunset. (Once again I had forgotten to pad the announced time of departure to accommodate the delays in actually getting everyone out the door.) The parking lot itself was already in shadow so I hurried across the road and up the hillside to what looked like an obvious viewing point, where I could see people congregating to watch the sunset.
I arrived with barely a minute to spare; the sun was already beginning to touch the fluffy clouds on the horizon.
I put my sunglasses back on to watch the sun slide below the clouds and slip out of sight.
With the sun below the horizon we slipped into civil twilight. I looked around to find my family and found them on top of the nearby hill, which I'm designating Point 9668 for its elevation on the topographic map. The summit was crowded with people who had just watched the sunset and were now looking around in the twilight at the clouds surrounding the mountain, which obscured everything that wasn't Mauna Loa to the south-west.
We hung out on the summit of Point 9668 for a few minutes before heading down to the visitor's center. (I wanted to head down the hill while we still had twilight to see; the only flashlight I had brought was on my phone, which would have worked, but still feels a bit awkward.) The visitor's center was a small building with a couple of displays about the mountain itself, its significance to the Hawaiian people, and the astronomical observatories on the summit; and a modest gift shop selling a bunch of shirts with logos of the various observatories as well as star charts. As we arrived the staff were turning the lights from bright white to lower-intensity red to help preserve our night-vision to go outside; this was a nice gesture but it made the displays somewhat harder to read.
The visitor's center's consideration of our low-light vision did not extend to the visitors in the parking lot outside. We found a place to stand outside in a picnic area, but people kept waving their phone flashlights around, and several cars pulled up into the adjacent parking lot and stayed idling waiting for spaces with their headlights shining into the crowd. (They might not have intentionally had their bright lights on, but many new cars now automatically blind pedestrians because they don't recognize them as cars. Please excuse me while I wave my cane at the kids on my lawn.)
A visitor's center staff person appeared in the crowd to announce that they would be doing a star talk in a couple of minutes, and took a moment to yell at the people parked in the no-parking zone (with their lights on). We headed around the visitor's center to listen to the talk, which pointed out several constellations in the sky with the aid of a laser pointer, which shone in the dust in the air so we could know what to look at. Seeing the stars from 9000 feet on the side of Mauna Kea was interesting, but my enjoyment of the experience was hampered by the bright lights on the four-wheel-drive vehicles coming down the access road, which were being stopped at a checkpoint right in front of the visitor's center for reasons unknown to me. We didn't have the urban light pollution of most places I've lived but we did have enough local light pollution that I couldn't make out the Milky Way when our astronomical guide pointed it out.
After the astronomy talk we headed back to the car and drove back to our condo, wrapping up our last full day on Hawaii.
I took even more pictures than I included here. They're all at Photos on 2025-01-05.