Aloha 2012

Day Six
Saturday

Today we went to the Kahuku section of Volcanoes National Park. We headed out at about 8:00 a.m. and arrived about 20 minutes after they opened the gate. This section of the park is only open on weekends. Once you pass the ranger buildings inside the gate it's basically undeveloped, except for a porta-potty at one trail head, and trail markers along the trails. The old ranch road is no longer maintained and is very rugged in some places and eroded and uneven every place where it isn't rugged. That's why we rented a Jeep for the day. We went quite a ways up the road last year in a sedan, and knew we (Meredith) didn't want to do that again.


This year, in a Jeep, we went all the way to the furthest trailhead. It was sunny and about 68 degrees with a light breeze. We hiked out to the rim of a sunken pit crater that has a pristine rain forest in it. It's an impressive sight. Then we took a different trail for part of the way back. We didn't see another person the entire time we were hiking. The area is very remote and very quiet. The only sounds we heard were the sounds of our own footsteps as we moved along the grassy trails (sometimes the grass was hip-high) and the sounds of lots of birds. These are some pictures of the trail.




This is a picture looking across the top of the pit crater.

We tried to take pictures of the steep sections of the road, but you can't really tell that the road is rough or steep.

After we returned the Jeep, picked up our car and had a nice shower at the condo we drove down to Keauhou to try out a new restaurant, Sam Choy's, for dinner. The food and service were good and the restaurant is up on a hill so that you can look out over the top of the town to see the ocean, so we got to enjoy a nice sunset while we ate. O's Seared Ahi salad.

Today's sunset taken from our table at Sam Choy's Restaurant.