Up the Saddle Road to the Pu’ u O’ o Trail

We have been staying at the northern end of Hawaii for the last few days, and decided to go to the middle for some new sights.

The Saddle Road (named for its shape) is a highway that crosses the island between east and west, between Hawaii’s two largest mountains, Mauna Kea to the north and Mauna Loa to the south.  The terrain goes between dry lava scrub land to rolling green hills to young lava fields to dripping fern-covered forests.  We chose the Pu’ u O’ o Trail because it crossed over some lava fields of varying ages.

(You probably won’t recognize the trail name because it is missing at least two more punctuation marks:  the Hawaiian alphabet has only twelve letters but seems to have innumerable punctuation variations.  For sake of simplicity, I will now refer to today’s trail as the P-Trail.)

(If you are tired of pictures of Brian’s back, I apologize, but I found it helped to give a sense of scale.)

As we drove to the trail head, we went from bright sunshine to cloudy skies.  As we were setting out to go, a bolt of lightning struck in the distance.  No big deal.

The trail started out rough but soon changed to rain forest.  The initial lava was laid down in the late 1800’s and had been successfully covered with vegetation.

Some thoughtful and hard-working people had built trail cairns of lava to indicate the way, which seemed a little superfluous at first.

Then we crossed a flow created in 1984.  Wow!  The trail went from plants to blasted rock in a foot.  There were huge boulders (like 6' tall), and the rocks were very sharp.

In the meantime, lightning and thunder had continued in the background.  Then, it started to rain.  Then it started to rain harder.  Then it started to hail little stones the size of glass pinheads.  Taking pictures began to be difficult because of rain drops on the camera lens.

Nobody says we are smart.  We continued.  After 1 ¼ hours out and no signs of rain stoppage, we turned back.  Few pictures were taken to cover the undignified retreat.

At the trail head, we poured water out of our boots, wrung out our socks, divested ourselves of any extra layers of clothing and turned on the heated seats of our rental car.  Shortly down the road we stopped to take a picture of Mauna Kea with snow on top, and the remains of the storm to the south, and the fresh lava near the road.

Another day of adventure!