Oahu's Mänoa Falls
Visited 11 January 2007
It's no surprise that Mänoa Falls is a very popular
hiking trail. It's easily accessible in suburban Honolulu, close to
the University of Hawaii. The biggest challenge of the outing is
finding a parking spot. The hike
itself is an easy 0.8 mile ascending 800 feet through trails mostly
graveled by Sierra Club volunteers and trimmed by machete-armed prisoners.
(Rains wipe out the trails with some frequency.)
What's easy is not without hazards, though. Some are
slow acting like the leptospirosis
bacteria waiting to devour your liver and kidneys. The germs can
enter through cuts in your skin if you choose to swim in the pool below
the fall. If slow death is not your preference, there's always
the rock falls that threaten Hawaii's waterfalls. Almost 5 years
before we arrived, 30 tons of rock fell 600 feet to the spot where most
people stop to gaze at Manoa Falls. Do the physics, you didn't want
to be there! Fortunately it was nighttime and no one was.
These hazards are now well marked by the good folks who
run Hawaii's hiking trails. This was not always the case. The
very popular Sacred
Falls in Oahu didn't act so holy when they killed 8 and injured 42 on
Mothers Day in 1999. The resulting lawsuit accused the state of
failing to properly warn visitors (most of them from out-of-state)
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about the hazard. Sacred Falls, once visited by 70,000 people per year,
is still closed. Manoa Falls has been closed routinely after rain washouts
and rock falls, but always seems to get reopened, often through the efforts of
volunteers. Here's some of the flora on the way to the falls:
The January rains provided enough water for dramatic affect in the Manoa
Stream -- without washing out the trail, as they often do:
This is one of many Hawaiian trails in the "Na
Ala Hele” system, the states trail and access program
Bamboo thrives:
Soon after passing through the bamboo forest, you get your first glimpse of
150-foot Manoa Falls:
Here's a shot closer-up:
This female Jackson's Chameleon dropped right in front of us as we turned away from the Falls
to return to our car:
Here's some of the 30 tons of rock that fell 600 feet in January 2002.
About 200-300 people per day visit the Falls, about the same as were visiting
Sacred Falls before its disaster. (Not unexpectedly, the closing of Sacred
Falls has created more traffic here). The January 2002 rockslide closed
the Manoa Falls trail for 3 months. It would have taken longer to
open but Bruce
Willis, shooting a movie about Nigeria nearby, loaned helicopters to move in
equipment to get the repairs jump-started. Now, stay behind the sign and
no one will die hard.
See lots more Mänoa Falls photos by clicking
here.
For an index of all of our Hawaii pictures, click
here
Created on 31 January 2007
This
work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
