Thursday, January 25th, 2007

Kauai, Part 2: The Grand (Waimea) Canyon

posted by lizzie    « 4 Comments »    tied to Uncategorized   

On Saturday we spent most of the day in Waimea Canyon. Mark Twain called it the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific” and I will let those who have seen the real thing judge for themselves whether or not it is a fair comparison. I was pretty impressed, but I haven’t been to the Grand Canyon, so what do I know? Anyway, we hiked down to the Waimea River, not realizing when we started out what we were getting into. It was super steep and really hot and dry for most of it. There was one part where the trail was washed out and we nearly slid down the canyon. But when we got back to the top I felt pretty good about myself for having made it from top to bottom and back without giving us a reason to go to the ER. And we were at least a little bit prepared for a hike with our two quarts of water and two All-Bran bars, which, in retrospect, is nearly the best planning we did all trip. Oh, and we brought our camera, too, so we could show you all what we saw.

See, it’s pretty grand, eh? It was probably the least tropical looking place I’ve seen since we moved here.

And the river sure felt good on our feet after hiking 2.5 miles straight down.

We only brought one All-Bran bar each, but we were lucky enough to find some lilikoi (passion fruit) which turns out to be rather seedy and difficult to eat. Still, it was enough to get us back on the trail again.

This lovely mountain goat decided to cut us off on our way back up the trail, but was kind enough to stay still long enough for us to get a decent picture.

As a side note, for dinner that night we decided to get a frozen pizza from the local grocery store. We have a full kitchen, right? Wrong. We did not have an oven. Or even a toaster oven. So what did we do? A little Heiselt ingenuity was in order. We had a microwave, but figured that wouldn’t get the DiGiorno crust to rise like it was supposed to. The only other means we had of warming food was a hot plate–a free-standing stove burner. And a large skillet with a lid. It took a little bit longer than the 15 minutes an oven would take (okay, more than 3 times as long), but we did have a warm pizza for dinner after our strenuous hike.

Comments

  1. Jodie says:
    January 25, 2007 at 10:08 pm

    Not as grand as the Grand Canyon, but still very impressive. :) And with a lot more foliage. Very nice.

    p.s. it looks like that mountain goat could use a few All-Bran bars, too. Poor thing…

  2. elizabeth says:
    January 25, 2007 at 10:49 pm

    I thought the same thing about the poor goat. I wonder if it is because there really isn’t much fruit in the wild lilikoi he has been eating.

  3. Becca says:
    January 26, 2007 at 11:29 pm

    Liz, when are we going to go the Grand Canyon? Has Micah been? I’ll be in Hawaii in June, but I’ve decided that I need to get out more and I’d love for you to join me!

    Way to go on the pizza you guys! Who thought of cooking it on the warming plate anyway? That was a much brighter idea than the one we had a few weeks ago when my roommate and I and our dates suffered in the bitter cold trying to light a campfire for our hotdogs. What were we thinking? I couldn’t feel my fingers after 10 minutes and I decided that the hotdogs weren’t worth it. College students…..

  4. elizabeth says:
    January 27, 2007 at 2:54 am

    I’m actually going to claim the warming plate idea as my own. But, like I said, we really didn’t have any other options. I will also say that as we were at the checkout I remembered that we didn’t have an oven, but we decided that we could probably figure out some way to cook it so we bought it anyway. We were feeling rather adventurous. :)

Leave a Comment