Stairway to Heaven (or Hai'ku Stairs) is one of Oahu's most famous hikes, made only more popular and desirable a climb because of its illegal status. I won't go until the details of why nearly 4,000 stairs were installed into the side of a massive mountainside or why it is now illegal, but if you want to read a little bit more about the hike and it's insanity, click
here or
here.
David has been dying to make the climb ever since he first heard about it a couple of years ago, but never found the right time or a group of people with whom to do it. The entrance to the trail is generally manned by a guard to prevent people from going up the stairs and you have to get there and on the trail early, early in the morning, before the guard shows up at 6 a.m. So when the Siebachs invited us to join them and a group of their friends on the hike the day after Christmas, we lept at the chance. I, for one, was totally unprepared for what was to come.
Sure, I knew there were a lot of stairs. And sure, I knew that you basically climb into the clouds and it gets really cold. But the hike kicked my trash and I'm glad I've lived to tell the tale.
Our story begins at 4 a.m. on Friday morning, when David and I woke to our dual alarms clanging and clacking us awake. We dressed and packed our small camelback hiking bag (with our provisions for the day for both of us) and walked over to the Siebach's house to wait for the three other people joining us on the hike. By 5:30 a.m., we'd made it to Kaneohe (after one or two wrong turns) and had found a relatively inconspicuous parking spot in a residential neighborhood near the first gate.
Now, there are many barriers in place to prevent eager hikers from reaching the stairs, but they are in such disrepair that it seems almost a joke to have them there in the first place. So we easily climbed over a fallen section of fence to reach a road, then traveled through a dark bamboo forest with the aid of a few flashlights (remember we began this hike when it was still pitch black outside) and paraded past the empty guard station to the trail head.
Had it been light enough outside to see anything, we might have stopped to see these signs at the foot of the trail.
But since it was pitch black, we strolled right past them, on our merry way, and shimmied past the second gated fence and got into position inside the metal railings of the stairs.
Now had it not been pitch black and had I been able to see that this was what I was about to climb up, I might not have agreed to this in the first place. But being blissfully ignorant of my future, I began the climb with all the zeal and excitement my sleep-deprived body could muster.
It wasn't very long after starting the climb--which at some points is quite literally vertical, like climbing a ladder--that I realized how woefully out of shape I was and quickly fell behind the others. Luckily, David was not about to abandon his wife in her time of need and he fell back to encourage me the rest of the way up.
I was ready to give up many, many times, especially when I would think we were nearing the top of the ridge, only to discover that there were nothing but more stairs in my future. Every muscle in my body was protesting and I had to stop and rest constantly, trying to wipe the dewy mist from my body. But finally FINALLY! I made it to the first platform, with the hardest part behind me.
The sun was just coming up as we reached the platform and I was greeted with this view of Kaneohe Bay below us.
It was a good thing I got a look at it when I did, because the clouds moved in not too long afterward and this was all I saw for the rest of the climb:
On a clear day, you can see all the way to Kaneohe on one side and to Pearl Harbor on the other. All I saw was stairs, sheer cliffs, and whiteness.
At the second platform, there's an old abandoned building, an old supply depot of some form, missing its roof and full of rusting parts.
Like the old pulley system behind us.
I don't think anyone would really want to use it anymore.
But I love old rusted bits of machinery. Can't say why.
So we continued climbing past the second platform, where the trail widened out a bit. There were some parts of the trail that were so narrow that I could barely squeeze my child-bearing hips through. But I actually discovered that the narrow railings made it quite a bit easier and much less dangerous in the ascent and descent. I think part of the reason the trail is "closed" is because it's not fit for two-way traffic. There's no room for squeezing past someone.
But, as we moved across the top of the ridge, to the final platform, the trail was wider and less vertical. And when we reached the end of the trail, we came up to another abandoned building.
The old building was an old satellite/radar outpost once used by the Navy and built during World War II.
Hence the big, unusable satellites.
More rusty things. Just because....
We stopped and rested inside the old building while two of the boys rigged up hammocks. It had taken us an hour and a half to reach the summit and I was hot and sweaty and my muscles were quaking with the effort but suddenly, I became inexplicably and undeniably cold. As I lay in one of the hammocks, wearing two sweatshirts, I started to shake uncontrollably and my teeth started to chatter. I'd never had my body temperature drop so quickly and while I knew it wasn't normal, it didn't scare me.
Poor David, on the other hand, was very worried but he went automatically into Boy Scout mode and started treating me for hypothermia. The other, more prepared members of our group, lent me a pair of warm track pants and a windbreaker and I stripped out of my damp clothes and into the warmer, drier clothes. David and I decided to start back down the mountain before I became incapacitated while the rest of the group stayed behind.
I started to warm up once we came out of the clouds and got past the first abandoned building, but my legs were turning rapidly into rubber. Anytime I paused, my legs shook....but eventually, I realized that this was happening to everyone else and didn't feel so ashamed.
The climb back down took us half the time it did to come up....and thank goodness too because I don't know if I'd have made it off the mountain if we had stayed any longer. And since it was actually daylight by the time we scurried down the mountain, I was able to get some shots of the craziness that is Hai'ku Stairs, like David descending out of the clouds on our way back down.
Or two of our companions making their way down the stairs. There were some parts that were scarier to come down than to come up, but for the most part it did not require one to make such faces as the guy above did.
Here is the most vertical section of the climb, which requires you to climb down like a ladder, while clinging to both the rails and ropes.
But though Stairway to Heaven was crazy and it nearly killed me, as you can see....it was totally worth it. Even the parts when I thought I was going to die. And even later that day, when I still felt sick from climbing 85 million stairs and even now, when my calves ache from all the activity and my knees don't want to bend anymore. Totally worth it.
So we made it off the mountain and back through the hole in the fence [so much for our early start....the guard never came] and then we passed through the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gum drops....oh, wait. We just went through the bamboo forest and down the road and over the fallen fence and back to the car.
And then we came home. And died.
Well, actually, we got breakfast and then the Siebachs, David and I went to the hospital to visit Brad and Charlie. And then, just as we had sat down to eat dinner with Gaby, Luke [the Siebachs], and the missionaries, a lightning and thunder storm rolled into Oahu and wiped out all the power on the entire island for twelve hours.
So my morning starting in the pitch black bamboo forest and ended in my pitch black bedroom. But oh, what a glorious day it was indeed.
