Waimea Canyon - Wow!

One of the reasons for staying at Barking Sands was for the easy access to Waimea Canyon, which Mark Twain supposedly declared the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific".  We were thinking, "yeah, sure, that seems overly dramatic and how could that be?".   But every view of the canyon had us saying "wow!".  (Interesting fact:  Mark Twain never actually visited Kaua'i so these words weren't his, nor had the "Grand Canyon" been named until 1908, well after Twain's 1866 visit to Hawai'i.)

We drove up the curvy, 19-mile long Waimea Canyon Drive, stopping at scenic lookouts along the way.  The Waimea Canyon Lookout at the 10-mile marker is at an elevation of 3400ft.

It's Kaua'i, which means chickens running around all over the place.

We continued to the end of the road to the Pu'u o Kila Lookout which is supposed to have an amazing view if it's not cloudy.  We got up here, at about 4200ft and this was the view, the camera is pointing northwest:

The view to the east started to clear:

The clouds were not clearing to the west so we went to have lunch, hoping the clouds might clear for us later in the day.  

After lunch we set off on a short hike on the Canyon Trail to Waipo'o Falls for closer canyon views.

Can you spot the arch?  Later in the day we realized that we could see the arch from across the canyon at a roadside viewpoint and were surprised to see how far into the canyon we had hiked.

Here we made it to Fall #1:

Fall #2 took a bit of climbing to get to, and we were at the top of the first part of a two-step, 800ft plunge.

At this point it started to rain when we needed to climb back up the already slippery rock.  Here KLP is ready in her rain gear.

On the return trip we took a short detour on the Cliff Trail to the Cliff Viewpoint:

Having fun playing the the new camera's features

Remember that completely cloudy view from earlier in the day?  This is what it looks like when it's clear.

This is the Kalalau Valley, the largest valley on the Na Pali Coast.  It is accessible only by an extremely strenuous 11-mile hike from the north shore or by kayak.  

Minutes later the clouds started to roll in again:

The last stop of our day was the Kukui Trail and Iliau Nature Loop.  We attempted to make our way down the canyon on the Kukui Trail but we were going to lose light and turned around by way of the nature loop.

This is an Iliau plant, endemic to Kaua'i, an ancient member of the sunflower family and relative of the silversword, which we saw on Haleakala on Maui.  

After our day in the canyon we attempted to find dinner on our way back to the cabin.  We stumbled upon some kind of community event and decided to take a closer look.  We found a "Bon Dance", a Japanese o-bon ceremony that honors the spirits of deceased family members.  We learned that Bon Dances occur every weekend during the summer months in different locations around the state.