A different planet this… The sun is low, all day. In the early afternoon it is late - the sun slides below the cloud shrouded mountains and dusk lingers just three hours past noon. There is only one color to be seen, blue, from the glacier ice and from the fleeting windows through the wind driven clouds. The bits of blue mix with an infinite number of shades of gray - and the white of snow, everywhere. There is a feud between the snow and gray. Even in the faintest of sunlight snow on the landscape wins and white prevails. All [View Full Entry]

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The Brady Glacier is an icefield - a huge sheet of ice. The key word here is ‘sheet’. If you think of alpine and valley glaciers as being frozen waterfalls and rivers of ice then you would think of an icefield as being an upside down dinner plate of ice. There is a large portion of an icefield that is closer to flat than it is to being ‘mountainous’. They are not really flat, but they get close. And you’ll see this in the photos: often the horizon doesn’t look ‘straight’. It’s not that the photo is crooked! It’s the gently [View Full Entry]

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“Spur Lake” is a 'glacially dammed lake' - one end of the lake is a wall of ice, the Brady Glacier. Ice calves off the wall and floats in the lake. Spur Lake is officially not named - you won’t find the name on any maps. I call it ‘Spur Lake’ because it looks, from a map, a bit like a thorn or, spur. But if you come to visit you can call it anything you’d like! Glacially dammed lakes are unusual in that one side of the lake is a wall of ice that holds back the water. Most of [View Full Entry]

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The weather drives me. Weekends of clouds keep me low, kayaking the coast, why climb a mountain to be in the clouds? My friend Nate says you just got to go… you never really know what the weather will be like the next day. And it’s true. But this weekend was starting blue sky and the forecast was good. So pauhana work on Friday early and off we went! Through the muskeg was easy, then the route I’d targeted ended in a steep wall. We backtracked and tried a different route. Ended up camping in the woods because we just didn’t [View Full Entry]

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...the final approach. [View Full Entry]

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There are three options for getting to Kalaupapa: 1) fly 2) hike the trail 3) ride a mule down the trail. The hike is... strenuous. 1600 feet. 26 switchbacks. If you do the hike switchback number 18 is reputed to be about halfway. Takes about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Flying in is a bit of an adventure - note the breaking wave at the end of the runway in the last photo, and yes that is the direction into which the planes normally take off. But the views are spectacular and the town and history are amazing. There is a [View Full Entry]

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Flipped the kayak, swam to shore... well, yeah, but that was in July of 1985. Yesterday I walked the same shore and 'relived' the event. The hike was easy enough - six hours, blue sky, blue water, puffy white clouds and Kona winds. The kayak story goes like this... When I lived on Maui in 1985 my friend Mark had a 2 person Nautiraid folding kayak. We'd used it for a year or so to explore the coast of Maui. It had a danforth anchor and we'd kayak out to a stretch of remote coast, drop the anchor 20 or 30 [View Full Entry]

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The north shore of Molokai. Blue sky. Blue water. Green cliffs. Windy, I forgot how windy it is here, how it can wake you in the night, how the coconut palms are always fighting the wind, looking tattered and tired. Occassionally the wind lets up, then the constant background sound is the crashing of north shore waves. [View Full Entry]

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This place is way more developed than I thought it would be. Lots of tourists. Continuous restaurants and hotels on the beach. [View Full Entry]

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I spent two days kayaking around Ko Mak (Koh Maak). Total of about 7 hours in the kayak. Most of the island is flat with sand beach, wooded rocky shoreline or mangrove. The western end is steep cliffs with a few small pocket beaches but this was only an hour or so. Winds were out of the north to west both days and were strong enough to be a consideration when route planning. The south side of the island was flat seas although due to the irregular shape of the island there were some areas where the wind was in my [View Full Entry]

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