Читать книгу Hawaii Trails. Walks Strolls and Treks on the Big Island онлайн

71 страница из 81

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.)