Canopy Panoply

We have gone ziplining a handful of times in the past: twice in Costa Rica where the sport began (originally as a means for biologists to research the rainforest canopy), and once here on the Big Island. That was 8 years near Akaka Falls on the other side of the island; I wrote about it here. But we only recently learned of another outfit that does it a little closer to Kona, in Kohala at the northern end of the island. That would be Kohala Zipline, who offer a couple of different excursions. We opted for the aptly-named “Zip & Dip”, a several-hour outing that included an impressive zipline excursion through Kohala’s ironwood forests, followed by lunch at a striking overlook and a brief hike to a couple of idyllic waterfalls where we could splash around in the 80°F water.

Our guide for the day was Dane, a beefy, fit, pony-tailed, and exceedingly cheerful local boy, born and raised on the Big Island. He actually speaks some Hawaiian and is married to a New Zealander, a beautiful Maori woman with whom he shares a cute little 7 month old daughter with a 27-syllable Hawaiian name that I cannot even begin to reproduce here. Dane was accompanied for the ziplining part of the day by Jake, an equally cheerful and enthusiastic mainlander with a triangular face, short scruffy red hair and beard, and a nose ring. Before coming here he was a restaurant cook in Canton, Ohio, of all places. (Janet, are you reading this?) He was in charge of maintenance of the ziplines, so you know that if he is with you it is definitely safe.

In fact, it is definitely safe, despite the intimidating 100′ height in some places. The lines are very cleverly engineered, relying on two parallel independently-anchored cables, one about 6″ above the other, supporting a triply-redundant system of harness and straps. The only way you’re falling is if a tree somehow falls while you’re up there. You wear a helmet, of course, and heavy work gloves that you use to brake your speed by pressing on the cable just prior to “landing” on the next platform, when the guide at the far end signals you to do so.

We got to the starting point by crawling steeply uphill in our 4WD van for about 20 minutes over the world’s most rutted road. It had rained earlier and even the 4WD struggled to get past one or two of the muddier sections, necessitating backing up about 50 yards at one point and making a run at it, building up a bone-rattling head of steam to have enough speed to make it across the patch. Once we arrived at our destination we took a moment to re-insert some of our teeth.

There were eight ziplines lines in total, the first few connected by a series of six precarious-looking Indiana-Jones-style suspension bridges zigzagging among the treetops. The call it the “Ewok Village”, for good reason.

You will notice on this particular bridge that there is a board running down the center. They do not all have that, and on those you have to step verrrrry carefully from one crosstie to the next to avoid testing the carabiners that you can see connecting us to the cable above. You might also infer from the photo that (a) you are very high up, and (b) this bridge would twist and sway very substantially as your weight shifts from one step to the next. You would be right on both counts; acrophobes need not apply. There were only two other people in our group, a young Korean couple who spoke little English. But you didn’t need to be a linguist to see that she was terrified; she was visibly trembling much of the time. But she went through it, to the applause of all.

The bridges and ziplines traverse what is called the Hawi Gulch, a valley where the original Hawaiians terraced the land with low stone walls and farmed taro and sweet potatoes. A couple of the walls are still visible. It is quite close to Kamehameha I’s birthplace, he being the imposing warrior king who united the islands under a single monarchy (his, of course) in 1810. He was under a sort of a fatwa when he was born, the king at the time having received a prophecy that a newborn male child would replace him, thus quite reasonably concluding that all such children should be killed. (If this sounds an awful lot like both Moses’ and Jesus Christ’s origin stories, go complain to Carl Jung.) Anyway, Hawi Gulch was where Kamehameha hid out in his teens before eventually fulfilling the prophecy and having seemingly every road, school, hotel, and shopping mall in the state named after him.

The eight ziplines started with a short initial 300′ bunny slope that they called “flight school”, teaching us how to distribute our weight, how to brake, what hand signals to look for, and how to hand-over-hand along the cable if you get stuck short of the landing platform. (They made each of us demonstrate our ability to do this, demanding also that we make the appropriate screeching monkey noises while doing so.) The skills were easy enough, and off we went on a series of progressively longer and faster lines, each time coming to rest on a platform on the next tree, where we would be unclipped from the line and immediately clipped to a safety cable girdling the tree. (We were always attached to something by two clips; when transferring us from a zipline to a safety cable the guides would always transfer one clip before undoing the second; consequently there was never a single moment when there was not at least one clip anchoring us. You could not, for example, mistakenly walk off the edge of the platform and fall fifty feet.) Here’s Alice on one of the middle segments.

I should mention that the weather had started out somewhat ominously, with high winds and heavy clouds down near the coast on the 1 1/4 hour drive up from Kona. But the gulch is at higher elevations and the weather was much sunnier there, though still pretty breezy. The guides stayed in touch with the office to monitor the winds: they cancel the outing if sustained winds exceed a little over 20 mph or frequent gusts above 25 mph because you do not want any wind-driven branches thwacking you in the face as you are zooming through the treetops.

The grand finale was the longest traverse, a 1200′ segment where you reach a speed of over 50 mph. This segment was also unique in our experience because there were two parallel sets of lines. So here are Alice and I underway, briefly holding hands before the small difference in our respective speed non-metaphorically separated us.

The end of the line of this final segment was a tree platform about 40′ up. The guides gave us a quick rappelling lesson, and down we went to terra firma.

Once safely down with our adrenaline levels returning to normal, we piled back into the van and lumbered back down the rut collection for a box lunch at a picnic area overlooking the stunning cliffs of Pololu Valley. But at this lower elevation the weather was back at the ragged edge of nasty, and while we were eating a rain squall moved through, casting an ominous ambience over our view of the cliffs. So I took these photos:

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(Three years ago I captured some dramatic drone photos of sunrise on these same cliffs on a clear morning. They look a lot different from this!)

The squall passed, and we headed back uphill for the final part of our outing, a series of secluded waterfalls that we reached by walking a steep but thankfully short trail down the wall of the valley. There were a number of interesting and occasionally edible native plants along the way — guava, lilikoi (passionfruit), some mushrooms and berries — that Dane enthusiastically pointed out. And finally, at the falls at the bottom, the water was warm, and in we waded.

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We had left the house at about 6:30 AM and got home around 3:30 PM, so it was a pretty long and full day. And a pricey one: this particular outing cot about US $300 per person. Still, it was a great adventure and we’d certainly recommend it to our future visitors.