Our first family hike as we whittle down our "to do before we leave" list was Aiea Loop. And you know...I JUST realized that we didn't do a Sunday hike after Lulumahu. We did this hike after Wiliwilinui, the next weekend after Lulumahu. I feel like we definitely did do a hike on the Lulumahu weekend, I just...cannot recall what it was. And there is no photo evidence of it. So uh, habeus corpus or something.
Anyway, Aiea Loop! Derek has been wanting to do this one for a long time. He said it was one he remembers fondly from when he lived here as a child, and while bossy me is never happy to do what other people suggest because the party should be all me, all the time, the sliver of me that is all too happy to accommodate was thrilled to do the loop. Derek said it was a pretty easy 5 mile trip, pretty flat, just a jaunt around an overlook area through a beautiful forest. He wasn't entirely wrong, though my legs were sore from a hike that has not yet been blogged about.
HE ALSO NEGLECTED TO MENTION THAT IF YOU PARK AT THE BOTTOM IT IS A STRAIGHT INCLINE TO THE TRAILHEAD, FOR A FUCKING HALF A MILE.
I am so out of shape. Let this be a reminder that people who are not obviously obese? Are in no way healthy. Don't judge fat people. I look pretty god damn fit now, but uh, fit aint me, chief. I'm a blubbery little cry baby that hates an incline and cries when she has to go upstairs to her own room, and can't she just sleep on the couch? Stairs are hard, you guys.
Alex slept the entire way to the trail, and she was a bit of a grouch on the way up, but because I far outwhined her, she was in a pretty good mood by the time we got to the trailhead.
Behold! A child:
Here we all are, getting ready to trek our way through Aiea Loop. Look! Alex looks genuinely happy to be there!!!!
Wait. Just kidding.
Here's the beginning of the trail, and my thighs and I felt fairly hopeful that there wouldn't be much up and down bits, as promised.
No. Just right out of the gate. I whined. Derek laughed.
The trail evened out, though, and it stayed fairly level for pretty much the entire five miles.
This is a bench maybe...a quarter mile in? And Alex already needed a rest. We denied her request, and her good mood deflated a bit.
She was definitely being kinda salty, but then this incline appeared:
I thought we had to go up that way, and I was ready to pack it in and either go back to the car, or move into that precise area of the forest so I didn't have to go up anything. But Derek assured me the way forward was not straight up, and even better, Alex took that incline as a challenge, it improved her mood, and up she went. Check her out, doing what my quads were screaming about.
Derek was right! Smooth walking. A welcome change of pace from the hike we did the day before, which was all incline, all the time, and my lower body was still pretty fucking thrashed.
The views were very nice, truly, but I was starting to notice an uphill turn in them. I uh...well, I wasn't pleased. Looks are usually deceiving, though, and the trail barely inched upward. IT was flat, and the view was divinity:
At this section of the trail, Derek and I heard a lovely, new to us birdsong We stopped for a solid forty minutes trying to catch sight of the bird so we could photograph it and identify it later, and as we were quietly trying to bird in the O'ahu bushes, a man walked by with his child, casually smoking a cigarette. Now, I quit smoking 6 years ago. I have smoked MAYBE 15 cigarettes since I quit. I do not judge people who smoke, it just isn't for me anymore. I DO, however, wonder about the iron fitness of people who smoke whilst hiking. What the fuck are their lungs made of??? I think the same thing about people who do a perfect face of makeup to take selfies when they hike, and don't sweat it off. I am just...I am more in awe than anything else.
My dad used to read me The Hobbit when I was little, and the thing I remember the most were the riddles that Bilbo and Gollum told each other. In retrospect, this next tree makes me think of a riddle that Bilbo tells Gollum. The riddle goes:
A box without hinges, key, or lid
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.
The answer is an egg. While this tree is not hiding an egg, it is hiding a treasure. I initially sat under this tree and busted out my macro to get photos of the gorgeous chartreuse algae/mold/fungus growing on the side of it. Derek and Alex wandered off to take photos of other stuff and to leave me to my macro devices, and I looked all around the tree, trying to find the best way to photograph the growth.
There we are! 7 miles total done that day, Two of us obviously had a wonderful time and were in fantastic spirits. The other of us is Alex.
And then this fucking husk scared the fucking tits clean off of my chest. I thought it was alive, and Jackson's Chameleons are invasive little shitheels, and do not belong in the O'ahu ecosystem. I was worried I was going to have to cut our trip short, catch the chameleon, and bring it to the park rangers. But no! It was already long fuckin' dead. Phew! What a load off.
Neat!!! I was super excited, and I hustled over to Derek and Alex and made them come see it, too. And Derek and I fussed and broke out lights and tried to get good photos on our really real cameras (a reminder that these are all cell phone photos). I will post all of the "real" photos I took at the end of the blog, but cell phone photos of anything are just...not in my wheelhouse of things I do well.
We spent about 45 minutes with that husk of a lizard before Alex demanded that we press forward. Which...fair. Photo hikes are crazy boring for her, she really could not spare two fucks to rub together about photography. Or posterity, for that matter. She does love to dig around and find other things that interest her, but when Derek and I are too busy to ooooh and aaaah over the things she finds with the fervor she requires, she loses interest.
The trail wasn't get more difficult per se, but it was getting less flat. The incline was so gradual as to not be a bother, though. The fallen trees everywhere made me kind of wary. Derek and I had recently started watching Alone and they talk a lot about deadfall. And...no thanks.
Not today, tree. Not today.
Even this little incline didn't feel so bad on my thighs, and it went right back to being flat as soon as we crested it. So considerate!!!
I thought this tree was so fucking cool. I tried to get a good, really real photo of the bark, and then one of these trees just being itself, but I couldn't figure out was I was trying to capture, so I gave up.
I just cannot with how verdant and gorgeous Hawai'i is as a general rule. It should be mentioned that I started writing this on May 5th, 2020, and it is currently February 24th, 2021. To say that I procrastinate is being generous, but I also just desperately miss O'ahu. Looking at these pictures from Missouri makes my heart sad.
I do love a knobby, gnarled old tree. It isn't for nothing that I have one tattooed on my left forearm.
If I were on Alone, I would sleep in the water to avoid the deadfall.
But the loop continued to be what Derek promised: easy.
Even in this photo, where you can see the upward grade, it barely felt like anything. When I was still an undergrad at the university of Hawai'i, I biked 6 miles to school, 6 miles back, every day. The first 4 miles were very flat, super easy, I did them in about 10 minutes. The last two miles were a horrible, wicked false flat. It LOOKED flat as some smooth, warm balls, but in reality it was a terrible ascent, and it took me somewhere between 10-15 minutes to manage those two miles, sometimes on a horribly hot day, it would take me twenty. The way home was a breeze, though, because I could just pick up speed leaving campus, and then coast downhill for two miles and catch the wind. These inclines were not like that, they were super gentle.
My favorite thing about Hawai'i was how any given place did not look like a lush, tropical rainforest. Sometimes I really thought I was in the Pacific Northwest.
Derek sold this hike to Alex (who, it must be stated, was fucking MISERABLE by mile 3) by saying that there is a downed airplane here. And there is. Derek and I didn't realize the hike to the airplane was pretty much rolling downhill for a quarter mile, so we just admired the wreckage from afar.
There's a little piece!
That was all we could see from the trail, since hiking down wasn't in the cards that day. Here is a link with a tiny bit of info about the plane crash (I didn't know there were ten people on board, I thought it was a one man mission! But no! Ten people. All of them died).
And here we go, at the end of our journey. What I did NOT take a picture of was me coming to the rescue of a dog in a shitload of distress. Overheating, miserable, and its owner was beside herself, on the phone with her boyfriend about where she was on the trail, he needed to bring water, just understandably upset. We initially walked by her, but I couldn't just do that. I had water left. So I walked back, asked if she wanted the rest of my water for her dog, and she tearfully thanked me, and I got to give a puppers some water. My good deed for the day freed me up to kick babies later on. The universe is balanced.
There we are! 7 miles total done that day, Two of us obviously had a wonderful time and were in fantastic spirits. The other of us is Alex.
As promised, here are the actual photos I took during the Aiea loop hike.
Here is the chartreuse algae or lichen or mold or whatever it is that I was photographing before I found that husk of a chameleon.
Here's that chameleon husk! But with much better lighting. I'm just horrible with my cell phones, as many historians have said.
And then more algae, because why not?
I was kind of rushed away from doing these macros properly, because my big ass was in the middle of the trail, and people wanted to get by.
My favorite view from the loop.
There are not words for how much I loved this tree. I really wanted to try other things with these photos, but this area was SUPER popular. A really good spot to take a rest. So I had to fire off these two shots, and then move along, because I am polite.
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