KALOKO — The first thing you notice when you shut off the car is the birds — audible even through closed windows and doors. Then you notice a forest spattered in the bright red blooms of the ohia tree, and you know why the birds are there.
The trail system through the cloud forest at the Makaula Ooma Tract of the Honualoa Forest Reserve is a gem. It’s a complete — often dripping — immersion in tree ferns, gnarled ohia and young koa, birds, wild orchids and occasionally resident parrots. The trails meander in places with an almost textbook kind of perfection reminiscent of a carefully planned park or garden.
It took Naomi Matsuo nearly 18 years to discover it.
She is waiting at a junction for her hiking companions to catch up, her Chow mix Sweetie on the end of a tether, staring ahead and looking like anything but.
For years, Matsuo got her rainforest fix in Volcano, some two hours away. This forest is very similar to the famed lushness of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Only this spot is near her home, just up the side of Hualalai from Kailua-Kona.
“I just found out about this trail maybe a month ago,” she says. “I wanted to hike somewhere up Kaloko and I thought there must be a trail, so I Googled it, and this came up. It’s so relaxing. The birds are chirping, and there’s not many people.”
The trail system offers a lot of hiking options, including a 3-mile join-up with another trail starting down at Hao Street. An excellent mile loop starts at the street’s end. Beyond the graffiti-covered barrier and signs, a left turn to the mauka allows the hiker to tackle the steep part over with first. As the well-defined lava trail rises into the wild ginger and ohia, apapane can be seen tumbling through the forest canopy, sometimes in pairs, often in groups of 10 to 15. The air is full of their sound.
The red apapane are hard to photograph. Amped up on nectar from the lehua blossoms they so resemble, they can’t generally stay in one place for more than a few seconds. But on Friday, as a gentle rain began to fall and the clouds moved into the tree tops, the birds gathered in bright, hopping flocks, congregating in particular blooming branches high in the old growth ohias.
There are a couple of ways to explore a trail — for exercise, or for relaxing and observing. No doubt you can break a good sweat at Makaula Ooma if you want, but the trail is particularly rewarding for the slow-goer.
Take a left at the top as the trail junctions at a fenceline. Beyond this first junction, the trail is marked with the trunks of young koa. Pullout-outs off the main trail offer views out into the top of the canopy. These are ideal places for birdwatchers to scan upper branches at their own eye level.
About a quarter of a mile on, another junction to the left is cleverly hidden by the trunks of tree ferns. It’s easy to miss, but this is the one that will take you on a winding way back to the starting point. The trail meanders, gripped with the fingering roots of ohia, edged by tree ferns and decorated here and there with orchids.
It’s like something out of a book or a movie only so much better because it’s real.
In all likelihood, the trails through the preserve were part of a larger system that linked the summit of Hualalai with the ocean, says Richard Stevens, a West Hawaii historian and trail hunter who rediscovered numerous trailways of the ancients in north and west Hawaii.
“All of the ahupuaa have at least one major mauka to makai trail,” Stevens says in an interview last week. “On the northern edge of the forest, there are several ahu, which indicate a trail that went makai from there.”
The bright birds flitting through the ohia would have drawn ancient hunters to one of the most highly-regarded treasures of antiquity — plumage for use in making capes and decorating helmets.
“They were the emblem of the alii and they were most prized,” said Stevens, whose students have helped reforest native trees at the tract.
The trail system has traditionally been accessed from both Hao Street and the end of Makahi Street off of Kaloko Drive, but that could change. The Hao Street Trail access crosses private property. The land was for sale and just recently went into escrow.
New ownership of the property at the trailhead means access issues aren’t clear, said Kona’s County Councilwoman Karen Eoff.
Eoff and Peoples Advocacy for Trails Hawaii tried to bring the property under the control of the Hawaii County through a purchase by the county Public Access, Open Space and Natural Resources Preservation Fund earlier this year, but the land wasn’t nominated in time for the county to move on the purchase.
Hikers can expect a peaceful and rewarding hike along the Makahi Street Trail, above Hao Street near 3,000 feet in elevation. But vehicle break-ins have occurred at the relatively remote trailhead, and visitors are urged to not leave valuables in their car.
Back near the beginning of the loop, Paul Maday and his four-year-old son Kingston are just starting out. Maday, originally from Fort Collins, Colo., now lives in Holualoa. His son wants to get into the wild now that he’s big enough.
Maday is accustomed to world-class hiking and biking within a quarter mile of his home.
“I wish the trail network was bigger here,” he says. “There should be more options out there like this one. This is stunning.”
