Hawaiian Walkways in

Hana Hou! Magazine Feb/Mar 2008

Excerpt from Ancient Pathways by Dennis Hollier

Many Big Island trail advocates, though, are used to taking matters into their own hands. Hugh Montgomery, for example, was an early member of E Mau Na Ala Hele and one of the principal advocates for the Ala Kahakai. In the late 1990s, he even traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress for Historic Trail designation. Nowadays, his focus is often on another chapter in the history of Hawai‘i and its trails. He and his wife own Hawaiian Walkways, a company that specializes in leading small groups on hiking expeditions—among them the Lower Hamakua Ditch, an unusual trail that he knows well: Several years ago, he helped rescue it from oblivion.

One afternoon last July, I met Montgomery at his Honoka‘a offices, and we drove off in his pickup truck toward the Lower Hamakua trailhead. The trail runs through private lands, and Montgomery has to lease the right to use it. To get there, we passed through locked gates, following obscure back-roads through former sugar plantations and old ranchland, now mostly planted in eucalyptus pulpwood. Deep in the forest, he parked the truck by the side of a dirt road and we hiked down a short path to where the gentle slope suddenly fell steeply away from us—the edge of Waipi‘o Valley. Through the treetops, the far side of the valley was visible in the distance. And, just a few feet below us, I could see a narrow trail carved into the face of the cliff: the beginnings of the Lower Hamakua Ditch Trail. Montgomery led the way down, telling the trail’s story as we hiked.

Although there were undoubtedly ancient trails along this route, this one is of fairly recent vintage, and a hike here leads into yet another epoch in Hawai‘i’s history: the age of Big Sugar. By the early 20th century, it was clear that the great sugar plantations along the Hamakua coast would need more water than they could draw from local sources, and they began a series of irrigation projects that still define the landscape. Engineers surveyed the current trail in 1907 to facilitate the construction of an elaborate system of tunnels and channels known as the Lower Hamakua Ditch. An enormous undertaking in its day, the ditch still draws water off the streams in the upper-watershed of Waipi‘o Valley even though Big Sugar is dead.

In 1909, at the height of the work on the ditch, more than 1,200 laborers plied the trail—most of them Japanese immigrants. They relied upon a stable of more than 100 mules to shuttle their supplies, and the trail was cobbled and curbed with lava stone to stand up to the constant pounding of the mules’ hoofs. During the three years it took to construct the ditch, mule teams freighted more than 25 tons of candles, 200 tons of TNT, 6,000 barrels of cement and more than 1 million board-feet of lumber. Almost all of those supplies disappeared into 9 miles of tunnel bored in the cliff face.

Once the ditch was completed, the trail fell into disuse. For a while, it remained an attraction—drawing travelers to see the waterfalls and the striking views down into Waipi‘o Valley. But relentless weather and a lack of maintenance quickly began to leave their marks on the old mule track. In his 1916 guidebook to Hawai‘i, Henry Walsworth Kenny would still remark on its beauty, but he felt compelled to add, “But it certainly cannot be recommended for ladies or people of a nervous disposition.”

Eventually, the old trail vanished. In some places, the jungle simply overwhelmed it—choking it off in ginger and guava and tree-ferns. In other spots, it was buried under landslides or detritus pushed over the lip of the valley by the bulldozers of plantation road gangs. “Hardly anyone knew it was here,” Montgomery says. By the time he re-discovered it, there were only the vaguest intimations of its former glory: some old mossy curbstones hidden in the tropical undergrowth, cave-like adits that led into the tunnels, and, here and there, patches of the old cobbles, barely visible through the foliage.

The highlight for most hikers on the restored trail is probably the vertiginous view from one of the lookouts down into the valley, or maybe the beautiful swimming hole under Hi‘ilawe Falls, near the trail’s mid-point. For me, though, the real highlight of the hike is the tale of the trail itself: A story of loss and improbable rediscovery, it’s also testament to an enduring passion among Big Islanders for their trails.

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