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Outside Magazine March 2002

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Soaked ( Cont.)


	"All the sinister powers of the earth are against you": The great ridge path of kane as it ascends Waialeale's misty peak.

BACK WHEN EXTREME SPORT was known simply as pilgrimage, Hawaiian chiefs and priests undertook the arduous trek to Waialeale to pay homage to Kane, the Hawaiian god of fertility. After a day's paddle up the Wailua River on the island's east side, the royal party abandoned its canoes to ascend the Kuamo'o-loa-a-Kane, or Great Ridge Path of Kane, a slippery, knife-edged goat trail. As they crested the summit, they entered an eerie landscape. Thick clouds swirled about the barren peak, often trapping the visitors in a cold, blinding whiteout. Fierce winds threatened to blow them over the lip of the crater. The mighty lehua trees that grew big as houses on the coast struggled here to reach the height of a man's knee. They knelt to drink from a small pond whose wind-wrinkled surface inspired the name Waialeale ("rippling waters") and scattered their offerings around a seven-foot-long heiau, or altar, that still stands not far from the pond. Then they got out of there.

"Bruce," said Bill. "Realistically? Your mountaineer people who go to the Cascades? They'll spend months back there, they don't know where they going."

In 1874, George Dole—whose cousin founded the Dole Food Company and whose brother, Sanford, was appointed the first president of the Republic of Hawaii after helping to depose Queen Liliuokalani in 1893—became one of the first non-Native Hawaiians to climb Waialeale. "Were it not for the thick tangled growth of trees and vines and bushes which cover this pali [cliff]," he wrote, "it would be utterly impossible to ascend." Dole returned bruised, lame, and cut up.

Kauai historian Eric Knudsen, who ascended in 1902 before the jungle reclaimed all trace of the Great Ridge Path, provided a similarly inspirational endorsement: "It's wet, awfully wet, and you get soaked and it's cold and you feel that all the sinister powers of the earth are against you."

So I'd come to the right place. But these accounts were a hundred years old. In search of a more up-to-date report on the mountain's condition, I turned to Tom Schroeder, head of the University of Hawaii's meteorology department and author of a 1999 study of Waialeale's rainfall patterns. "The terrain's boggy, the trees are stunted, and most of the plants don't look green because they don't see enough sunlight," he told me. "The USGS flies a chopper up there every few months to check the rain gauge. They don't land, they hover. If they landed, they'd sink. It's quite dangerous. They're flying in along the ridge, and the clouds often close in. In the old days, the USGS guys read the rain gauge by hiking in through the Alakai Swamp. Took 'em days. One of them died on a trip once. Went in and never came out."

Waialeale, it turns out, is a diabolically perfect weather machine. After cruising over 2,000 miles of open Pacific, warm northeasterly trade winds sweep up the mountain's ridges and create an updraft so constant that helicopter pilots can maneuver their craft like gliders in its slipstream. The moist air cools as it rises, reaching dewpoint at about 3,000 feet and dropping a constant scrim of mist on the upper reaches of the caldera. The mountain's nearest "rainiest spot" rival, the village of Cherrapunji in northeastern India, receives most of its 450 inches of rain in monsoon bursts that can be terrifying in their ferocity. Waialeale, on the other hand, produces some of the gentlest rain on the planet. It's just that it hardly ever stops.

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