Superblog: Olomana: Return of the Hikers

Where to today? Back to conquer all of Olomana of course. The first time Mits and I went, we got lost, and you can read about the adventure here. Jared, Mits and I returned to do all three peaks today, and we asked Winston, but he was busy until 3. I got Mits and we met Jared at the spot where we park. We made our way across the bridge and past the guard shack.

Up the road and to the trail entrance we went, and we made sure to take the path with the fallen tree on it. It was kinda muddy today because of the rain that had come during the week, so it was slippery, and on top of that, Jared forgot his running shoes at school. He used his vans and he made it through all three peaks. So back through the hike, with all the steep climbing, and we made it to the top of the first peak in about half an hour. We got pictures of the scenery, and Jared took some pictures to give to teachers for graduation. Onto the next peak...
The descent from the first peak is easy, and you climb down just to climb back up to the second peak, the shortest of the three. There aren't any good views from the second peak; most or even all of the good views can be seen from the first peak alone. But we didn't just come for the view, we came to hike and/or climb all three peaks of Olomana. Mitsuo was going through the trail quickly today. While we stopped for pictures, he just blazed on, so we arrived at the second peak, where he was waiting, and we continued on. The climb down from the second peak is something else...

The second peak is pretty steep almost near vertical, and without the ropes provided, you would have a hard time getting down. The dirt and rocks on the ground are loose, and will easily make you slip, so make sure that you are within reach of the rope if you do slip.

Now after going down that steep hill, you need to go back up the third peak. It's all just easy kine rock climbing, and there are ropes if you wanna use them. The path from the second to the third peak has all the cool stuff. There's a point where you need to scale the side of a rock wall, and you have a rope to help. When you make it to the other side, there's a rock with a hole in it that makes for a cool photo opp. Then, there's a more dangerous photo opp that I got into, or in this case below. There's a hole in the rocks on the side of the mountain. Someone can climb down and a friend can take a picture looking through the hole. The ground under the hole is pretty slippery and is a long way down if you loose your footing, so don't do it if you don't think you can. It was just something we thought of.

Finally we go to the top of the third peak, and guess what, others who make it to the third peak will know you made it there too. There's a medicine bottle with lots of ribbons tied to the branch it's hanging from, probably to get peoples' attention. And in the bottle are pieces of paper to write your names and date on it, as well as any other comments you wanna add. We added our names after checking out the drop on the other side of the third peak.

If you wanna go descend from the third peak bring some rope. There's a 7 foot high drop to get down, and there's only an electrical wire with about 2 or 3 feet of it hanging on the drop to help you. Mits climbed down on the side, but he scratched himself pretty bad. There were scratches everywhere so climbing down at all isn't really a good idea unless you're well equipped. Mits said that there's another drop more on, and the trail there is overgrown, so it would be pretty hard to go down that way, not to mention how you're gonna get back. If you go all the way to the bottom after descending the third peak, you'll be far away from anything, even the golf course, so you'll probably be wandering around for a while.

Anyways, Olomana was a good hike with a good workout, since it's steep. We started at 9:30 and got back to the cars at 2:30, and probably would have finished earlier if we weren't taking lots of pictures. But, I got good pictures, so it was worth it.