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Trip 2

Waimanu Valley Backpack

Distance: 17 miles

Elevation gain: 4400 feet

Hiking time: 11 hours

Topos: Kukuihaele, Honokane 7½

Difficulty: Strenuous, hiking boots mandatory

Highlights: Waimanu Valley is famed for much of the same kind of beauty as is Waipio Valley. Smaller Waimanu Valley was once well-populated and fertile, too. But Waimanu is now utterly uninhabited and wild. It’s preserved as the Waimanu National Estuarine Research Reserve. Take this trip only during the “dry” season (roughly May through October) because of the large number of potentially dangerous stream crossings involved. Trail closures are frequent; check first.

Driving instructions: From Hilo, drive northwest along the Hamakua Coast on Highway 19 for 40 miles to the turnoff to Honokaa (Highway 240). Allow plenty of time for this drive, as the Hamakua Coast is very lovely. After turning right (north) onto Highway 240, follow it through Honokaa and several smaller towns to the end of the road, 9⅓ more miles (49⅓ miles total), just above Waipio Overlook. Under no circumstances should you even consider driving down into Waipio Valley! The 4WD-only road is extraordinarily steep, narrow, and a trial even for drivers who know it well.

Permit/permission required: To camp in Waipio Valley as described below for Day 1, contact the Bishop Estate. Camping in Waimanu is very strictly regulated by the Division of Forestry and Wildlife; you must have a permit from them and may camp only at the site assigned to you. See the Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

Description (“easier” trip): Even in the dry season, you must ford at least two good-sized streams on this trip: Wailoa Stream in Waipio Valley (nearly armpit-deep on me) and Waimanu Stream in Waimanu Valley (waist-deep on me). Be sure you and your backpack are prepared to get wet. Also be sure you have a rainproof tent: it will almost certainly rain at night in Waimanu. Caution: This trip is not for beginning backpackers.

Day 1 (1½ miles): Take a few minutes to walk down to Waipio Overlook to enjoy the view of the valley. Rain-drenched, dazzlingly green Waipio Valley is one of the Big Island’s most famous beauty spots. However, some of the waterfalls may be dry: their streams are tapped “topside” for irrigation, so there’s little water left to cascade down into the valley. The overlook offers the best views you’re going to get unless you decide to tackle the switchbacks you’ll see zigzagging up the west wall of Waipio Valley. This is an excellent place to take your photos of Waipio, too.

Back at the top of the road, you’ll see a sign with a black diamond on it. You’re probably familiar with the use of the black-diamond symbol to indicate the most difficult runs at skiing areas. Well, the road that you hike down into Waipio Valley is a black-diamond road—though the warning is for cars rather than hikers. Watch out for the loose gravel on the shoulders; it’s easy to lose your footing on it and fall. Ignore side roads (they’re driveways to private property.)

In ¾ mile you reach the valley floor and turn right, toward the beach. As you approach the coast, you enter a grove of ironwoods and curve left through the grove (which also happens to be the camping area). The grove ends on the banks of the major stream through Waipio Valley, Wailoa Stream, 1½ miles from your start. Most of Waipio’s gray-sand beach is on the other side of Wailoa Stream, so ford the stream as best you can—no bridge, no rocks, no logs. Especially on weekends, you’ll find families frolicking in the stream, so you can watch them to get an idea of where it’s safe to cross. Some innovative people float their picnic gear across the stream on boogie boards. (At its deepest, the water was almost armpit-deep on me.)

Once across Wailoa Stream, you can wander across sand and cobbles as far as the opposite wall of the valley. Waipio’s waters are too rough for swimming, but don’t let that ruin your day. Pick your spot, spread out your towel, get out your picnic lunch, and enjoy the scenery. Much of Waipio Valley is privately owned, so you’re not free to wander through the valley.

Camp in Waipio Valley.

Day 2 (7 miles): From the east bank of Wailoa Stream, cautiously ford the stream and follow the beach until you are almost at the valley’s west wall—just below a small rise with a rather flat but steeply pitched, grassy top. A very faint path leads away from the beach, through the cobblestones, and into the forest about 200 feet east of (before) the small rise. Even if you cannot pick out the path at this point, head through the cobbles into the forest, keeping your eyes peeled for a well-trampled path. It’s currently used for horseback tours of Waipio, so it’s not only well-trampled but full of hoofprints and dung. You may smell it before you see it. Pick it up and head west, toward the valley’s west wall. You shortly reach a junction with a trail that goes right, toward the valley wall. The junction may have a sign, but don’t count on it.

Turn right to begin climbing the steep switchbacks of the rough Muliwai Trail up the thousand-foot sheer west wall of Waipio Valley. At first you’re still in dense forest. Soon you emerge into sunlight and to unsurpassed views of Waipio. The trail is generally well dug into the sheer cliff, so it’s not quite as scary as it may have seemed from the overlook on the east wall—Waipio Overlook. But it is every bit as steep as you’d feared when you were scanning it from Waipio Overlook. The footing is sometimes rocky, sometimes impeded by overgrowing weeds—grasses, cayenne vervain, clover, ulei, and ilima.

As you near the top, the trail enters a dry forest of ironwoods, silk oaks, paperbark eucalyptuses, and Norfolk pines. Your long-range views are gone (gone until you reach the beach at Waimanu, in fact). The trail levels out amid spindly ironwood seedlings and wanders over the soft, slippery carpet of fallen ironwood needles as it rounds the nose of a ridge. Plants more typical of the rainforest replace the dry-forest trees as you dip into the first of the many gullies you must traverse between Waipio and Waimanu. The mosquito-y gullies can be very muddy, so watch your footing. Streams run through most of these gullies, and the second stream you cross has some pretty cascades and a small, deep pool in a fern-lined nook just upstream of the trail. A couple of streams farther on, you’ll find a small cascade with a deep pool just downstream of the trail.

This pattern of dry-forest ridge “noses” alternating with rainforest gullies continues all the way to Waimanu. At some points, the trail has been hacked through dense thickets of Koster’s curse (Clidemia hirta), one of Hawaii’s most troubling pest plants. At 4⅔ miles you reach a trail shelter and an outhouse, both of them battered, dirty, and uninviting. The nearest water—possibly just stagnant pools—is in the next gulch from here toward Waimanu. (See below for another idea if you must make camp before you reach Waimanu.)

At last you negotiate the final ridge nose and begin your descent to Waimanu—hard to tell for sure because of the heavy growth. Take your time here, as the trail not only pitches very steeply down but becomes much worse: narrow, exposed, and debris-filled. (It would be almost impassable when wet.) Small landslides cut across it at inconvenient spots. Lower down, the track is also filled with slippery hala leaves. Arrival at the valley floor comes as a relief. Bear right, toward the beach and toward one of the two composting toilets for campers in Waimanu. There is a campsite here on the east side of Waimanu Stream, but it is for use only in an emergency, such as when the stream is unfordable.

Carefully ford Waimanu Stream and, once across, pause to take in the view of the valley from here. It’s one of the best viewpoints of this deep, dramatic valley, which has more waterfalls plunging over its sides than Waipio has. Most of the “beach” at Waimanu is boulders, so you veer away from the boulders and follow a path under ironwoods past the first few campsites as far as the other composting toilet. Your campsite is assigned to you when you get your permit. Not all of the campsites are marked with their numbers, but the map you get with your permit will help you identify your site. If your campsite is farther on, turn seaward and continue on the boulders, and eventually on the sand, to your site. Water is available from a stream, fed by Keawewai Springs, on the west side of the valley: follow a muddy track from the end of the beach back into the valley to a running stream. Be sure to purify the water before drinking it.

Waimanu Valley beach

Even with a stop at Waipio Valley, the trip to Waimanu—especially that last drop down into the valley—is exhausting. Plan to spend at least a day relaxing and enjoying Waimanu! Under sunny skies, the gray-sand beach at Waimanu is a lovely place to stretch out. Unfortunately, the bay is too dangerous for swimming. Need anything more to do? The next trip, Trip 3, is a side trip to the nearest of Waimanu’s many waterfalls.

Day 3 (8½ miles): Retrace your steps.

Camping midway to/from Waimanu

What can you do if you can’t make it all the way to or from Waimanu in one day? The shelter at 4⅔ miles is, as I said, uninviting. Possible campsites between Waipio and Waimanu valleys are the flat areas under the dry forests of the ridge noses. Just be certain you observe this caution: don’t have any kind of open flame while you’re camped there! The ironwood needles that thickly carpet these flat spots are extremely flammable. I wouldn’t even light a match or use a backpacker’s stove there. There’s no way you could escape a forest fire if—perish the thought—you started one. So eat a cold meal and enjoy a sound sleep on the soft mattress of ironwood needles. I did, and it was one of the most comfortable campsites I’ve yet enjoyed on the islands.