Kauai Day 6

Waking up at Anini Beach

We woke up at Anini, only about 20 yards from the water, and under trees. This was without a doubt the best camp spot we’d been at. We showered in the outdoor showers, and headed to Hanalei to get some supplies for our big hike today on the Kalaulau Trail, along the Na Pali Coast. Mel went to a coffee shop and I ran into a grocery store. I came out with two bananas and an apple to go along with the oatmeal we’d fix, and Mel came back with a Maui mocha and a cinnamon roll, stating, they looked insane. We were about to go on an 11 mile hike, on what was to be our toughest trail we’d done, and this is what she got, ha. For the record, the cinnamon roll looked incredible and tasted even better. We went to Haena campground to park the car there, although it was a mile from the trailhead, the car would be safer there over night. We packed up and stuck our thumbs out and got a ride with a couple from Idaho who was heading our way. They dropped us off and he headed out. The trail was immediately a steep incline, over big rocks about twice the size of your head, thus we knew this was gonna be serious. The trail was basically up and down into and out of valleys, right from the get go and the entire way. The flat dirt sections were few and far between, so much that you loved them each time you got to a flat section. Each time you hiked out of a valley though, you’d end up on a cliff going around a mountain, up high above the ocean, and each time the view seemed to get better. Sometimes we’d come around the mountain and there’d be huge waterfalls way back up in the valley pouring down, so far away and up high it was almost impossible to gauge how big the waterfalls actually were.

Uphill!

All smiles

This is what you get to look at the entire trail

That water down there is actually that color!

These guys have webs everywhere! They're pretty gnarly looking. Mel saw one on my head the next morning and I freaked!

Other side of things

Beach offerings

That totals to 83 people i think


Beauty

Saw this guy crawling around

We handled the beginning well, with lots of breaks, as we were on no schedule. We planned to be back on the trail and camping for 2.5 days. We’d heard that some of the trail is sketchy and the trail is only a foot wide with a sheer drop right there. This seemed to be the case as a lot of the time the trail was super skinny, with a big drop on your right side, down the mountain and straight to the ocean. We handled it well though and took our time. We got to the camp 6 miles in at about 1:30, which took us about 5 hours to get to. We ate lunch and headed onward. At about 7 miles in, we came to a big valley that didn’t have vegetation like all the other valleys, and it had a sign indicating that the cliffs were crumbling rocks and very dangerous. We scoped it out and started hiking, but almost immediately Mel had a bit of a panic attack, with reason, and we stopped to reevaluate it. We could see the trail along this entire dangerous section (about a ¼ mile long probably) and it seemed that it got worse the farther you went. We decided we didn’t need to risk it and stopped there. We watched another couple do it, so it obviously was possible, but we figured “oh well” we’ll do something else, less stressful, on our vacation, and live to tell about it. So we hiked back a mile to the camp and set up the tent. It was raining in this valley so we hung out in the tent the rest of the evening, except to cook food, which was super good. We were low on water too, which stunk, cuz apparently there was a pig hunt that day and they were cleaning them in or near the water somewhere up stream of us. When you went near the stream, it just smelled of iron/blood, so we didn’t really want to use it to boil and use for food. We did get some rainwater though. It seriously poured that night, and we awoke once to a cat fight outside near our pots. We think one of them stole our red spatula, which we really loved. Bummer. Needless to say, this 8 miles we hiked today kicked our butts pretty bad. We could have made it to the 11 mile camp, but whatever, ha.

Awesome view looking back at what we'd hiked. Check out the width of the trail and positioning

Don't slip

We stopped to take so many photos like this. It was never-ending photo opportunities here



So many cool flowers along the trail too!

Click on this one to check out the waterfalls up in there

Seriously, don't slip

More pretty flowers

Click on this to make it bigger and check out those waterfalls way up there. They're huge!

This photo is slanted b/c I was trying to take a panorama and it was too tall from ocean to mountaintop


Mel smiling with relief after we decided not to go on

Panorama of the sketchy section of the trail. We got about 20 yards in on the right part of the trail. The real sketchy part looked like the section down to the left around the points there.


Maher gathering rain water... we got a little bit this way, ha.