Ka'au Crater Hike

Of the eight or so amazing hikes we did on our recent trip to Oahu, Joe and I agreed that the Ka'au Crater trail was by far the best -- in fact, we both think it's the best hike we've ever done.

Start/finish of the trail, and location of marriage proposal

The sign at the start of the trail seemed a little sketchy, and the first steps of the trail involved a rope, which foreshadowed the adventure to come.  According to Joe's All Trails app, the trail is 4.5 miles.  It turned out to be more like 6 miles -- 6 very slow miles.  Our fastest mile took about 29 minutes, and we had one mile that took us more than an hour.  The total elevation gain was 2,300 feet.

The beginning stretch was fairly flat and took us through what looked like a prehistoric forest, with huge trees and beautiful vines hanging down.  It was rooty and muddy, and we followed along the singletrack beside some old pipes.  (This was an opportunity to continually quote The Simpsons: "What the hell is this, some kind of tube?")  We passed by a group of twenty-somethings who were talking about their hostel and their trips to Africa and other exotic places.  Then all of a sudden, we found ourselves following a stream, and it was pretty clear we'd lost the trail.  We decided to keep going along the stream, because that was the general direction we wanted, and then we came to a pool beneath a small waterfall.  We didn't want to backtrack, so we swam through the pool and climbed up the waterfall.

[Joe's note after reading this post: "You should tell them how I made you go in first and test how deep it was.  Say something like, "Heroically, Joe had me go in first to test the water level."  Okay, Joe, done!]

Anyway, after we climbed up from that waterfall, we soon came to an awesome waterfall we could go sit behind.  That's where the twentysomethings caught up to us, and we took a picture for them.

After we left the kids behind, we pressed on, and never lost the trail again, and we were virtually all alone on the trail.  That was the first in a series of three big waterfalls we passed.  We climbed along the side of the second one, and we got to climb straight up the third one.  (Video here.)  We were thankful for the ropes that had been placed in all the tricky spots by an older guy who called himself Uncle Joe, who Joe had met at the HURT 100 race the previous weekend.

After the waterfalls, we climbed up to the rim of the volcano crater.  It was surreal to pop out of the jungle and see the flat plain of the crater below us.  On the near side of the crater, we were in the clouds, and it was windy and drizzling.  At one point, it seemed like it was raining upwards at us.  Climbing around the crater involved a lot of rope-assisted climbing until the halfway point, and then a lot of butt-sliding down steep, muddy ridges.  (Videos here and here.)  The trail made a lollipop shape around the crater, and once we got about halfway around, the clouds started clearing, and we could see the beautiful views of the mountains, the city of Honolulu, and the Pacific Ocean.  We kept marveling at how anyone could have installed the powerlines we saw at the top.

Butt-sliding down the ridge, in the clouds

Every once in awhile, we'd joke about our "blistering pace" ("Wow, that last mile was sub-sixty minutes!") and marvel about how incredible this hike was, and how we might never in our lives find anything to top this adventure.

We had no idea the hike would take as long as it did, so while I had enough water, I had only brought the one energy bar that we split at the second big waterfall.  We hadn't had lunch, although we had some excellent shave ice in between our morning hike (Koko Crater) and this hike.  I was starving, and before we started our descent from the ridges around the crater, I asked Joe if we could split the granola bar he'd brought.  He generously gave me the whole thing, which I was super grateful for.  Then we headed back down into the jungle-like, rooty singletrack, which rejoined the trail we'd started on.  Joe says it was around this point, with less than an hour left in the hike, that he decided to scrap his plan to propose later that night and propose when we got back to the trailhead instead.  We were enjoying the most adventurous, beautiful, strenuous hike we'd ever been on, and we were stinky and filthy with mud from head to toe.  He said this was more true to "us" than a fancy hotel dinner would be (although we did enjoy a fancy hotel dinner later that night to celebrate).

When we were almost at the trailhead, I delayed us a little bit by attempting to wash a layer of mud off in the stream.  It didn't work so well, and right before we got back to the trailhead, Joe looked back and commented, "Now it just looks like you have diarrhea running down your legs."  I responded, "Yeah . . . looks like" and we both laughed.  If I had realized that Joe was about to propose in two minutes, I would have joked with him about making the least romantic comment possible in what would typically be the most romantic situation.

Another funny thing was that Joe reached the trailhead a couple seconds before me, since he was ahead of me on the trail at that point.  I didn't know what he was planning, so I called ahead, "Can you take a picture of that sign at the top?  The one that says it's an unmaintained trail or whatever?"  Joe obligingly turned on his camera and tried to take a picture.  He just got his GoPro right before the Hawaii trip, and he's still working on mastering it, so he accidentally took a video of the sign, and you can hear him ordering, "GoPro Camera mode" in a frustrated attempt to use the voice command.  I asked him to save that video forever.  It's pretty funny.

Finally he was able to take the picture I requested, and then before I could walk away toward where we'd parked the car, he gave me a side-hug and said, "So I was going to do this later at the fancy hotel, but I decided this is more 'us.'"  Then he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.  Since he hadn't planned the proposal this way, he didn't have the ring, and we joked that that level of preparation was also appropriate for us.

Another detail that's fitting for our personalities is that instead of buying a ring, we're using a ring I already had, because we'd rather spend our money on experiencing more adventures together than on something that, like as not, I'd probably lose anyways.  Later that afternoon, he showed me what he got instead of a ring: he started a savings account for us labeled "Julie and Joe's Australia Vacation."  He put the money he would've spent on a ring in that account, and he set up an automatic transfer to keep adding money from each paycheck.  We're hoping to have enough to go sometime in 2018.  Australia has always been my dream trip, and I still can't believe that it's actually going to happen.

I don't know if we'll ever be able to top the adventure we had at Ka'au Crater, but it'll be fun to spend a lifetime trying.  We're also looking forward to coming back and doing this trail again next year and more times in years to come, because it will hold an extra special place in our hearts as the site of our engagement.

Back at the Air bnb right after the hike and proposal