Waihe'e Hiking Day

Woe is me, Micah is gone. He left on Friday afternoon and things just haven’t been the same since! :p

We did lots of cool things while he was here: plenty of smoking cigars on the beach, hiked through a burned up wasteland to see petroglyphs, tried to fix our jeep, drove around West Maui on a ridiculously narrow “two way” road, watched the sun set from a field of dried up lava…

But the best thing we did was our hiking day in Waihe’e! I took the day off last Wednesday and we drove out to Waihe’e to hike a ridge and a valley. We did the ridge hike first which was 3 miles and a 1500 feet elevation climb to the summit. The views along the way were stupendous! When we got to the top, the summit was clouded in which looked really cool. The ground dropped off all around us, and then only white.

The 3 mile hike down was steep and slippery so it was kind of freaky, but we got great views of Wailuku and beyond, as well down into a lush green valley.

Once we got back to the Jeep, we drove down the road a bit to the Waihe’e Valley/Swinging Bridges hike. This hike was a bit easier, 2 miles each way on fairly level ground. The views weren’t as amazing, but it was cool to be down in a valley similar to the one we saw from our ridge hike. The highlight of this hike was the two decrepit swinging bridges that we had to cross. These bridges have seen better days, the boards to walk on were loose and split and being held up by rotten looking two by fours. There were cables to hold on to, but these were attached to the floor cables by flimsy wires that were mostly loose or broken. It was CRAZY but a lot of fun!! At the end of the hike there was a little swimming hole where we sat on some rocks and ate the food we brought.

A quick hike back to the Jeep, and then I decided to drive us over to the other mountain on Maui, Haleakala. We went up the mountain from Kula on Waipoli Road and pulled over at the Ali'i Kula Lavender Farm. We claimed an area with deck seats and talked about life/family/etc while taking in the view of the valley from the other side of the island. It was an awesome way to wind down after our 10 miles of hiking!