Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Moanalua Kamanaiki Stream

Kamanaiki seams like the forgotten valley of Moanalua to me. I've never even heard about it until I tried to find the old swimming hole of Wai'apuka. Straight up Wikipedia'd this one and just headed out after slapping the google man at the end of a road to find the trailhead. It must have been around September of last year and there wasn't much rain in that season although the ponds were supposed to be fed by an artisan spring anyway. The stream was almost totally dry rock beds with a couple of ponds only a few inches deep of stagnant brown water that I could hardly imagine were any remnant of the three actual Wai'apuka ponds.

An awesome Heiau was only a few minutes from the trailhead and then deeper into the valley I would find small rock walls that I've found may have been house sites for chiefs at different times in the past.
A cave where Kahahana of Oahu might have hidden with his wife for a time near the end of his life and a cave that Kamehameha set up camp with his warriors may have been in this area.

I also found some very random things around the valley. A classic truck was just about covered by the underbrush aside a hill deep in the valley like it came down from Tripler Hospital way back when somehow and just fell to pieces with time. On the way out I found a mini lab for who knows what, but it was marked with Tripler tags. Some old bottle that read Duraglas was just standing upright like it was ready to finally be recycled if not searched on eBay for any value. Some animal skulls were placed onto trees. Not really that different from some other trails on island in that sense, now that I think about it.











1 comment: