The waters around Kailua were sparkling invitingly below the trail, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t even see. With the mud sucking at my ankles, I might as well have been on the moon for how much good the ocean was going to do me. My eyes were firmly fixed on the trail that seemed determined to toss me off the ridge the second I took a wrong step, and my thoughts were as follows: Am I going to have to crawl? I really don’t want to put my hands down; who knows what could be living in this mud! We’re a tropical climate, we have microbes and centipedes and probably leeches and when I get to the top of this ridge I’ll want to wash my hands and obviously there’s not a bathroom past this hill, holy crap this is so steep. I’m going to die. 

The Lanikai hike is always steep, but the mud was new. We’d started later in the day than I was used to, which left ample time for the daily rain to happen before we even reached the parking lot. I’ve never been great with inclines and had puffed my way up the trailhead even in perfect conditions; the introduction of mud turned the hike into a new kind of torture. I was debating turning back (but how will I get down this slope without breaking my neck?) when a cheery voice broke through my concentration. “You talk to your Heavenly Father!”

The speaker was a short, round, smiling Chinese lady, who had wisely brought hiking poles, looked to be about seventy years old, and wasn’t even slightly out of breath. I also had never seen her before in my life. This didn’t seem to bother her, because the moment I looked up she grinned. “You ask God. He’ll get you up the mountain!”

“Good…idea,” I wheezed, and doubled my efforts to ascend another two feet while the Chinese Superwoman bounced up the hill like a freakin’ springbok. God, and/or a stubborn desire to not be bested by a trail that was clearly no problem for a woman at least fifty years my senior, eventually did get me up the mountain, although I had no energy left to haul myself onto the cement pillboxes.

The Lanikai hike is not usually so bad, although the trail starts immediately with an (incredibly) steep incline guiding visitors up to the ridge. After rain, it turns nightmarish, but on pleasant days the view from the top is worth the effort. The crumbling pillboxes, leftover bunker lookouts from the Second World War, offer perfect eyries for Instagram photos or a post-hike picnic. The boxes are tall, with no easy way to climb, but people with some arm muscle are able to pull themselves up and over. Soldiers from generations ago used them to watch for incoming airplanes or submarines; today’s visitors simply enjoy the sight of the Pacific stretching out thousands of miles to California.

Surprisingly inoffensive graffiti covers the pillboxes and honestly makes them more photogenic, but it goes without saying that just because someone else has tagged the bunkers does not mean you should. Everywhere you travel should be left better than when you arrived, but Hawaii is ecologically and culturally a very sensitive place. Trash left on the trail could kill off a species found nowhere else on the planet; graffiti over what already exists could be silencing locals who are only just emerging from an environment of constantly being silenced. Respect the trail. Bring plenty of water and a walking stick or hiking poles if at all possible – it isn’t a loop, so you do have to go back down the hill of doom, which is more treacherous than going up. And take your time! Not only is a slower pace safer, ostensibly you are on the hike to enjoy the view, so you might as well do exactly that.