Looking down towards the South Kohala coast as the sun drops below a band of clouds, shortly before sunset.
Sunset and clouds
Author Archives: Graham
Powerline Trail
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Straight.’ See more offerings here.
Last week, I revisited the Powerline Trail off of Saddle Road. This trail, when combined with the Pu’u O’o Trail, makes a good long loop hike. I like hiking the Pu’u O’o Trail because it passes through several kipukas (patches of old forest that have been spared by lava flows) and those kipukas have lots of birds living in them.
The Powerline Trail is a bit less interesting. There are fewer kipukas and it’s a long, exposed hike in a straight line across the lava. The reason for this can be found in the name. It follows an old 4-wheel drive road that serviced a power line that ran across the lava fields. The line is gone, but the sawn-off stumps of power poles can be seen alongside the trail (to the right of the trail in the top photo, to the left in the bottom photo).
One advantage the Powerline Trail has over the Pu’u O’o Trail can be seen in the bottom photo. This was near the end of my hike in the mid-afternoon as clouds closed in. It’s not unusual for this part of the saddle to be shrouded in thick fog and, if you happen to be out hiking in those conditions, the straight and clear Powerline Trail is much easier to follow than the Pu’u O’o Trail which, crossing the lava fields, can be hard to follow when you can’t see the cairns that mark its route.
The trail, of course, isn’t perfectly straight (though I suspect the power line was). It bumps around lava upwellings and collapsed tubes. But most of the time, one just needs to look up to see, straight ahead in the distance, the faint pale thread of the trail topping a hill or emerging from a dip in the landscape.
Goat boarding a helicopter
This goat looks like it’s thinking about climbing aboard the helicopter. Probably a good thing it didn’t since that likely wouldn’t end well.
Pu’uanahulu jacarandas
Pu’uanahulu is a small community midway between Kailua Kona and Waimea, on the upper road between those two communities. I don’t drive that highway much, except when I go to hike up Pu’u Wa’awa’a. Last time I did this, driving through Pu’uanahulu, I noticed that the jacaranda trees were in bloom alongside the road. What I hadn’t realized is just how many jacaranda trees there are in this area.
These photos are taken from the northern slopes of Pu’u Wa’awa’a. The bottom photo shows the general area with the purple jacaranda flowers of Pu’uanahulu clearly visible. The top photo shows a closer view of part of the community and the abundance of flowering jacaranda trees.
Abstracts: Fern frond
A close up of a new frond of an endemic amaumau fern (Sadleria cyatheoides).
Bee on a passion flower
A bee on a passion flower as another bee approaches. What I like about this photo is the one bee’s leg up in the air. A friendly wave? Get away from me? Only the bees know for sure.
Signs: Sign of the times
This sign went up on one of the stores in downtown Hawi recently. Many local stores rely on tourism to make ends meet, but there are virtually no tourists. Not that it matters, because non-essential businesses have been shut down for a couple of months anyway. Some businesses are now being allowed to open again, but a cautious approach is being taken – rightly in my opinion – and it’s likely a fair number of enterprises will never reopen.
Ironically, it was just over a year ago that I did another post about this shop (here). It was after that episode that Hawaii Cigar & Ukelele expanded in to the newly vacated space. But now they’re both vacant and not likely to be filled until something approaching normalcy returns to the area.
Yesterday’s swim
This is a second response to this week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme of ‘Waterworld.’ (See more responses here.) Yesterday, I posted about the movie Waterworld. Today, it’s a probably more expected response.
These are photos I took during my swim yesterday. Visibility in the water was patchy with some good areas and some not so good. I didn’t see anything startling, though the mackerel shads aren’t a common sight. Last time I saw such a shoal there was a great barracuda lurking on the other side. I looked around and, sure enough, there was another one looking interested as it cruised low down, too low for a decent photo.
The other oddity was in the photo at left. I saw what I think is a spotted coral blenny on this patch of cauliflower coral, and snapped a quick photo before it took off. But it was only when I processed the photos that I saw something else, to the left and slightly below the blenny. I think it’s a small trumpetfish, but it could be something else. A lot of small fish and other creatures hide in coral heads so I must pay more attention from here on.
In short, it was a fairly typical swim.
Graham's Island 