Kalalau Killer Hike

Twenty years ago, Janene and I decided to do a crazy thing. For our 20th wedding anniversary we chose to go backpacking on the Na Pali coast of Kauai to Kalalau Beach. The trail is 11 miles long and is listed by The Sierra Club as the most difficult hike in the United States. Backpacker Magazine calls it one of the ten most dangerous hikes in the world. The trail is over a thousand years old and leads over successive pali or cliffs along the shore of Kauai where no roads could be built.

The cliffs rise abruptly from the ocean and this leaves the trail mostly on the edge of the cliffs sometimes a thousand feet above the water. The rugged terrain forces the trail to climb hundreds of feet quickly with subsequent drops to clear obstacles in the path. Each drainage has steep walled canyons with waterfalls at the head of each canyon. Every one of these canyons must be crossed by following the contours of the land. This means that you will be hiking in dense jungles when in the canyons, and on shear cliffs when near the ocean.

The final destination is Kalalau Beach with a huge waterfall that drops right to the beach from the cliff face. The first two days we were there, we were the only ones on the beach. This is not a swimming beach. The waves pound this beach relentlessly and we had to almost yell at each other to be heard over the noise. It never rained on our trip and the heat was unbearable, but the view from the beach was worth it.

We set our tent up back from the beach in the forest atop piles of leaf litter. It made for a soft bed, but all night long we could hear little critters and slithering things underneath us. We carried sleeping bags and pads and never really needed them at all. We also took the cookstove and fuel for boiling water and cooking. We vowed that if we ever went again, we would not carry all that weight.  It was way too hard to stay balanced on the trails with all the weight on our backs.

This view from part of the trail above gives you an idea of the trail as it approaches one of the cliff faces. At that point the trail is no more than a foot wide with precipitous drops below to the crashing surf.

This is what it looks like looking down from that same section of trail. The waves have carved a tunnel out of the lava rock. The trail is on crumbling cinders and volcanic dust, so it turns into a Slip-N-Slide when it gets wet. Fortunately it didn't rain until our last day when we had passed this scary part.

 

This view is from the other side of the same spot.

 

Once we had passed the extreme cliffs, we relaxed a little. There was a short buffer of vegetation before the cliffs dropped into the ocean so it seemed safer, but here Janene slipped quietly off the trail and started rolling down the hill. I didn't hear her until she screamed as she approached the cliff face. She had the presence of mind to spread eagle with her arms and legs or she would have been a goner. She wasn't hurt. She was mostly worried that the bottle of champagne (bubbly grape  juice) and the champagne glasses she had hidden in her pack for our anniversary night on the trail had broken and that I would think she was bleeding.

Over all, it was an enjoyable and rewarding trip even though much of the time we were totally exhausted. We had spent five nights in paradise. We vowed that, someday, we would return. Only next time, we would dispense with the sleeping bags, the sleeping pads, and all the cooking gear.