A Weekend in Wonderland

Aloha kakou,

What a crazy weekend.  Friday started off with a hike with the Society of Hawaiian Archeologists to Kaawaloa. Best known as the place of Captain Cook’s Monument, Kaawaloa is also an incredibly rich resource of archeological sites, history, and marine life.  We hiked out for about 3 miles on the old Government road remnant and walked back around 2.5 miles on the Cart Road.  Both alignments included lots of rocky terrain, overgrown California grass, koa haole, and the prickly seeds of ilima.  Hot, interesting and rewarding day.

Saturday found me up at 3 a.m. to rendezvous with a Travel Channel film crew to watch the sunrise of Mauna Kea from the Mauna Loa Weather Observatory road vantage point.  From the hot and humid lowlands of Kona, I found myself pre-dawn in the freezing sub-alpine of Mauna Loa.  As the cameras were set up to film a time elapse of the sunlight washing across Mauna Kea, we were greeted with a view of four mouflon sheep making their early morning migration across the lava.  But even better were four Nene hunkered in the pahoehoe who slowly rose to soak up the warmth of the sun and then gracefully, one at time after being warmed up, took flight and flew off to the lower grasslands.  After an on-camera interview we then did a short forest segment at Puu Huluhulu before parting ways.

The film crew were impressed with the cold, the lava, and the breathtaking morning on the mountain.  Poor souls were then on their way to Waikiki.  The show is “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Hawaii” and will debut on the Travel Channel December 17th.  Speaking of TV shows, Weatherventures, a new television series that debuts tonight on The Weather Channel features Hawaii Forest & Trail Adventures with three HFT guides Buck, Anne, and Joel.  Check it out if you can.  It repeats every week through December.

After my filming I finally made it back down to Kona at the Keauhou Beach Hotel for the in progress Society of Hawaiian Archeologists conference.  I was able to catch a few presentations on studies from North Kohala including a look at the different agricultural types found in Pololu Valley and another study that analyzed sources of five different basalt adze found in the valley.  Good stuff.

I finished the weekend after a hard day of work on our property with my son Ben by taking a visiting young man caving.  We went up to a friends property mauka Kona and explored for a little over an hour in a large tube that has lots of evidence of big water moving through it intermittently.  We did a few crawls, a couple climbs, and a lot of sweating.

So let’s see:  hot, humid tropical hiking, ancient and historic sites, a conference of archeologists, filming a TV show in the netherlands of Mauna Loa lava at 35 degrees Fahrenheit, sheep from Corsica, Italy, endangered geese, walking in sub-alpine forest, and caving in a lava tube.  A weekend to be had only on Hawaii Island.

With Aloha,

Rob P.
Posted by Rob Pacheco at 6:06:57 PM in Blogs by Rob Pacheco, HFT Founder (16) | Comments (1)