The partially cloudy skies and moderate tradewinds on Saturday made for perfect riding conditions. I hadn’t been anywhere near a bike for over two weeks ever since that bout with bad tapioca, so I was a bit worried that I would be in the suffering seat on this ride. The traffic into Waimanalo was typically bad on Kalanianaole at the merge, so I got to the trailhead a little behind schedule. Ckucke and Root were already there, but Jeff and Sara were running late since Sara had forgotten her jersey and didn’t want to ride topless for some reason.
After everyone showed up, we hit the trail and headed straight up Government Road. The ground was hard and dry. There hadn’t been any significant rain in the weeks I’ve been off the bike, so I had been missing out on some epic trail conditions. I did the climb up to the Ditch turnoff seated then upshifted a few cogs on the cassette and stand-climbed the remainder of the hill to see if the legs were still working. I made it up with no burn. It’s nice climbing with almost 5 kg less body bulk to haul around!
We did the side loop, then returned up the road and headed out on the main trail. Ckucke and Jeff were in the lead, so the pace was brisk to say the least. We ascended the cardiac arrest climb to the upper side and took a break at the big tree. Jeff cleaned the entire climb, and Ckucke and I rode the majority of it with a few dabs and wind sucking breaks. While we were jaw-jacking at the tree, Ckucke became curious about one of the upper trails, so after we recovered, we backtracked toward concrete block hill.
On the way out, I spied a singletrack to the right just after the blue pickup truck carcass. It was a fun, twisty singletrack, and my enraptured calls lured everyone else down it after I turned into the trail to explore it. It was generally downhill, but not steeply so. Other than a straight section where it momentarily broke out into sunlight at a crossing of an old rutted doubletrack, it wound sinuously through the Formosa Koa (Acacia confusa) trees. It was a little narrow, particularly at the turns. If I tried to lean into the turns, there was a tree there to catch my inside shoulder. That seriously dialed back the fun factor of the trail. The end came quickly, and we found ourselves at the main climb up to the big tree.
Returning to the tree, we backtracked past the new trail, the cardiac climb, and up the rutted road to the concrete block climb. The direct route was steep, grooved, and loose, so we took the workaround to the right and ground up the steadily increasing slope to the summit. At the top, Ckucke found a Heineken bottle filled with large cockroaches. Apparently they could climb in, but not get back out. Ckucke remembered the trail that lead up toward Olomana from the hilltop, and we decided to try going in a ways. It started out overgrown by California grass (Urochloa mutica), but opened up when it got under tree cover. It looked used, so we continued on, going deeper into the woods, and further up the mountainside. There was a continued promise of meeting a junction to another trail from the left, but after each pitch, this never materialized. The trail was so well-worn, we kept thinking there had to be some way in from the side, so this trail could be descended without first struggling up it. At a point probably as high as the heinous night ride climb I made, we turned around and went back down.
Back at the concrete block hill, Taro tried descending an indistinct trail to the left of the workaround climb we had come up. We could hear him through the trees, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. I went down the left trail that leads to the Norfolk side a ways to see if I could see him or hear him more clearly, but that didn’t work out. I returned to the top, and soon after, he popped out at the bottom of the workaround climb. We returned to the big tree and dropped in the fat guy singletrack to the upper trail and headed back. The majority rule was to bypass the inner loop, but I felt like I could probably manage to do it if we had decided to go. We did backtrack up the exit side of the loop and drop in at the Lauae fern hill. All in all it was a fine ride.
My legs survived the ride without too much trouble, although later that night my right knee did hurt a little in back, and the next day there was a bit of post-ride discomfort in the quads.
D = 13.02 km (8.09-miles), Vavr = 10.6 km/h (6.6 mph), Vmax = 38.6 km/h (24.0 mph), T = 1-hour, 13-minutes (actual trail time around 2-hours, 45-minutes)
More pictures here
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