Kalopa State Park

The trail-head is hard to find. Hell, the park would be hard to find if the road didn’t go right there, it’s not like there are a lot of signs. I asked the park ranger for directions — to the trail-head, not the park, I was in the park — and he waved me past a rusting shipping container.

“It sort of funnels you in to the trail,” he said. There was an open meadow, littered with big yellow flowers fallen from above, and then, a little box with guides and a worn sign saying “Nature Trail.”

It’s all overgrown, the trail is crisscrossed with roots and the markers feel like they’re facing the wrong direction about 75 percent of the time. I read about the spectacular strangler fig trees in the xeroxed handout (one dollar) but I never did find the marker, it’s probably been, you know, strangled.

The map seems suggestive, merely, and the descriptions cover what used to be there as much as what’s there now.

“You’re standing where there used to be an amazing kukui, but it fell over in the 70s and decayed to invisibility in the 90s.” Greetings from 2018. The guide appears to have been last updated in 2012, complete with the comments of whoever did the update. There’s a bit where you’re directed off the trail to find an olomea, then a note that says, “Unable to locate olomea.”

No matter. There’s a weird sort of poetry in having this kind of anecdotal information about a place that is so alive it seems the trail closes up behind you as you search for the way forward. There are blazes of white paint on the trees and they work well enough when you can see them. Which is most of the time, but sometimes, I had to back up, or search between the dense growth to locate the next one.

I saw three other couples while I walked, one trying out his bird calls but to no avail. Apparently that’s a huge crowd for this place, six people.  I was glad to see them; their presence reassured me that I had not got lost.

I was genuinely surprised when I found I had completed the loop and saw the sign for the parking lot.