living like locals: Happy 4th of July!

As I have mentioned in some of my last post hiking is one of our favorite things to do here in Hawaii. There are several reason why we enjoy it so much...1. IT IS FREE!!! This is a huge bonus for us here since everything is expensive and our funds are always running on the low side. 2. It is good exercise and fun at the same time. 3. It is beautiful. We have climbed tall mountains with a view, hiked in the wooded straight paths just enjoying the greenery and one of our favorite types of hike is a waterfall hike. We like to jog on the way and then jump in the cold water after we are nice and warm. There is a beautiful water fall hike in Pearl City where we live, Waimano Falls. Last week we brought my youngest brother Andrew and his friend Felix and my mom to this hike. The waterfall was way stronger than usual due to the rain. I will be posting pictures soon of that hike. Oh yea by the way they are all staying with us for almost a month on their summer vacation.

We have been wanting to do this one hike in particular pretty much ever since we first arrived on the island. It is called stairway to heaven or Haiku Stairs and it has that name for a very good reason....

It is almost 4000 steps up the side of the mountain. One of my previous post I showed some pictures from a hike called KoKo head and it is only 1000 steps and is a pretty intense hike so needless to say I was a little worried about all those steps.

Landry and I have been waiting for a good day when we were both off work with no plans and we really wanted to hike it with some friends. The more the merrier on this type of adventure. OH YEA...I forgot to mention this hike has been shut down and is illegal to hike. Which makes it a little more of an adventure. It is not dangerous, I have mostly just heard that there has been lots of complaints from the surrounding neighborhoods about the noise level so they closed it down. So you have to get to the trail before the security guard shows up.
So my brother Andrew, his friend felix, Justin Jones(a friend from church), Ron(one of my co-workers) and Landry and myself all met at the wal-mart parking lot last night at 1 am to go on this hike. Landry and I both worked yesterday and were planning on taking a nap before we met up, but my excitement kept me wide a wake.
We got to the trail around 1:30 and parked our car on the street in a neighborhood. Right when we got out of the car a lady yelled out her window....I am trying to sleep! So we quieted down and headed up the dark service road with our backpacks full of snacks and water and our head lamps on. We knew how to get to the service road but not how to find the stairs so we spent the first 45 minutes getting our legs nice and warmed up as we stumbled around in the dark looking for the trail.
We had heard that the guard gets there at 2am and we thought he was gonna be there and we weren't going to be able to go. But luckily no guard was there and the long hike began around 2:30 am. It was pitch black and I could only see the steps right in front of me with the light of my head lamp. The nice thing about this hike is there are rails on either side to help pull yourself up with. But of course in the middle of the night they were pretty wet and the steps were pretty slippery.

Some necessary, thug poses in one of the buildings we stopped in on the way up.

We arrive at the top around 4:15 am and it was Cold and Windy. People had told me it was cold up there, but I just thought in my head yea cold for Hawaii is probably not really that cold, right? But they weren't joking it was cold and we were determined to wait at the top until the sun came up around 6 am to see the view. Landry had text Justin to tell him he might want to bring a long sleeve, but he didn't get the text so he wore shorts and short sleeves and he was freezing. The smartest member of our group was Ron, with two pair of socks and jeans and a long sleeve shirt and a jacket.
When the sun finally came up we could not see anything!!! We were so high up we were in a cloud and we had to climb down quite a bit to get a clear view.