Last Sunday I had to help run camera during my church’s morning service, so I wasn’t able to join the hiking club on their members-only hike up Godek-Jaskulski Ridge. However, I really wanted to go hiking that day, so Elden and I decided to spend the afternoon exploring a little-known trail above Pearlridge called Waimalu Ditch.

I’d read about this trail before on Kaleo Lancaster’s blog, and used his excellent trail description to help us successfully navigate the barely discernible junctions and prevent a repeat of what happened to John Parsons in 1998.

The trail started off innocuously enough as a dirt path on the side of the entrance to Nahalekeha gated community. True to its nickname (Dogshit trail), there were piles of golden turds all over the place – I guess some things never change.

Fifteen minutes after starting the hike, we entered an area overgrown with tall grass. Near the entrance to the tall grass section there was a hole in the ground that had cool air blowing out of it, probably fed by the large mouth of a nearby cave. Once we pushed through the annoying tall grass, the trail opened up again.

Along the trail we passed a large tree on the side of the path that had fallen over. We also passed another tree exactly like this one about a mile further down the trail, which made me wonder what could have possibly caused an entire tree to be uprooted so cleanly.

As we approached Waimalu Middle Ridge we began to descend rapidly, eventually reaching its base and a slowly trickling stream. After crossing the stream and working our way around the side of the ridge, the vegetation changed dramatically from large trees and aerial roots to ferns, hala trees and Chinese Ground Orchids. It was quite beautiful along this section of the trail.

After a while the plant cover finally opened up enough for us to get our first good view of Waimalu Valley. The forming clouds near the Ko‘olau summit loomed ominous, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. At this moment the batteries in my GPS ran out, leaving us in the proverbial “fog” – I need to remember to bring extra batteries next time.

Past this point a thick bamboo forest seemingly appeared out of nowhere, signaling another abrupt change in scenery – here I found several interesting mushrooms growing along the path which I didn’t see anywhere else.

After exiting the bamboo forest, we reached a wide grassy clearing marking the important junction where we would begin our climb up Waimalu Middle Ridge (it appears after the first sighting of uluhe ferns). I had wanted to continue further down to explore the stream and pools, but we were running short on time. After marking the junction at the base of the ridge with some additional ribbons, we began our ascent.

We handn’t climbed fifty feet up the ridge before the rain began to come down in sheets. Fortunately I secured a nice branch to use as a makeshift hiking pole, which I used to safely make my way up the ridge (never mind that I had an actual hiking pole in my backpack – the branch was more fun).

After fully soaking us in its deluge, the rain ceased when we reached the top of the ridge. Here we stopped to eat lunch and enjoy the great vantage point from which we surveyed the surrounding valleys and ridges. By this time my camera was completely waterlogged, so there are no more pictures from after this point; however, I do have a video of the ridge on my Facebook page.

After the break we continued making our way makai along the ridgeline, trudging through an angry sea of uluhe ferns. This is where I fully began to appreciate the awkwardly high length of my gaiters. After hacking our way through the ferns, we eventually ran across two ribbons marking a junction with a path leading down the ridge. That was probably the proper way to finish the loop, but Elden and I just continued heading straight until we reached a point where the ridgeline seemed to drop off suddenly; we then hopped down to the left side of the ridge and continued walking until we reached the trail, and from there retraced our steps back to the trailhead.

Back in the neighborhood we ran into an elderly gentleman walking his two dogs, who stopped to ask us if we were hunters. He told us that people rarely find pigs on the trail, but his neighbor easily hunts them with a bow when they wander into his back yard (haha). After a nice conversation we packed up our mud-soaked gear, got in the car and drove back to church, satisfied with our adventure for the day.

Visit Flickr for more photos of the Waimalu Ditch trail. For a video of the ridgeline, visit my Facebook page.

Last Saturday I solo hiked the ‘Aiea Loop trail on a whim, and while I was there I meandered down an interesting side path which turned out to be the ‘Aiea Ridge trail. I traveled along the ridge for about an hour and a half, snapping photos and enjoying the cool mountain breeze. While the loop trail is usually well traveled on weekends, I was surprised to find myself alone on the ridge trail. There’s a wide variety of interesting trees and plants on the top of the ridge, including ‘ie‘ie vines, tree ferns and mosses.

One can appreciate the beauty of the mountains while driving through Halawa Valley on the H3 Freeway, but it’s another experience altogether when you’re exploring it on foot. ‘Aiea Ridge is one of the nicest ridge trails I’ve been on, and because it starts at the same trailhead as the ‘Aiea Loop trail, it’s easy to access. Parking is also fairly safe at Keaiwa Heiau State Park (don’t overlook good parking… you don’t truly appreciate it until someone tries to break into your car).

I posted photos of the ‘Aiea Ridge trail on Flickr. Sometime in the future I’ll organize a day hike so we can finish the entire ridge trail together; it’s not really safe to hike on ridges by yourself, but I didn’t fall off the side, so I guess this one time was OK…

Recently I closed my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I didn’t plan on mentioning it since I didn’t think anyone would notice; however, some people have been wondering why I did it, so let me explain my reasons for jumping ship.

In the new 2.0 culture that we live in, über-transparency is an accepted way of life – in fact, it’s a socially acceptable addiction. Every thought that goes through our head is tweeted, things that were once considered private are openly shared between complete strangers on a global electronic billboard, and life itself has been reduced to almost nothing more than a constant stream of status updates. Maybe that’s a little extreme, but you get the idea.

The popularity of services like Facebook and Twitter stems from a basic human desire: the craving to be seen and appreciated. Today’s online social networking applications facilitate instant communications on a mass scale, allowing individuals to feed their cravings to be noticed like beggars at a feast. Unfortunately, the depth of interaction that occurs between individuals within most social networking frameworks does not and cannot fulfill our deep social and emotional needs. Although we may have 1,000 “friends” on Facebook and can chat with a dozen people at any given time, the reality is that a day spent on Facebook will often leave you emotionally dry and socially bankrupt. Facebook and Twitter sold themselves to us by making “socializing” easy, but all they’ve done is made us victims to “easy” relationships.

The phrase “easy relationships” is a sad oxymoron – serious, meaningful relationships are never easy, and being someone’s friend means more than sharing a superficial affiliation on an electronic network. When we confuse acquaintances with friends, it subconsciously affects the way we view and interact with people and the world around us. The reality is that most of the people on our friends lists are not really our friends, and some of us spend more time on the Internet than with the people we know. One of the hallmarks of true friendship is intimate, meaningful communication, and this is lost when we reduce our inner thoughts and feelings to one-line status updates that are broadcast to everyone in the world.

Have you ever considered that Facebook and Twitter are the two largest social conditioning and data-mining applications ever created? These applications make it easy for individuals to commoditize for the corporations, freely and without concern, their feelings, thoughts, interests and relationships – we blindly give away our most personal information through the social networking matrix, even though we would object if the same information were gleaned from us unwittingly. Privacy is arguably the single most valuable remaining right that we have in this country, especially in an age where the government, social trends and identity theft threatens to undermine our ability to keep ourselves to ourselves – and yet, ironically, privacy is non-existent today primarily because we have vanquished it with our own hands and fingers. We are only now beginning to realize the true depths of the intellectual and social theft that we have perpetrated against ourselves.

There are too many things happening in my life that cannot be condensed into a one-line sentence; even multiple pages of information on this blog could never express the feelings inside of me. Some things can only communicated through looking into someone’s eyes; feeling the tension of an uneasy silence; hearing the emotions of another human being coming through his or her voice – these are things we’ve lost in the 2.0 culture. In light of this, I have decided to temporarily close my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Call it an experiment in social networking 1.0 – where a face-to-face conversation replaces the chat box, and a telephone call replaces leaving messages on my friends’ walls. I understand that there are benefits to social networking that sometimes balance the cons, and I appreciate them. However, I don’t want to continue being sucked into the 2.0 culture, because I’m a human being – not a 140-character status update.