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Outside Magazine March 2002

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Soaked
It sounded like a good idea at the time: Journey to the sopping epicenter of the wettest place on earth, bag the peak, and get back in time for supper. But that was before the clouds clamped down on Mount Waialeale. Before the jungle closed in and the map became irrelevant. Before the machete-wielding, pig-hunting swamp guide said, "Would be so easy to get lost back there, brah."

By Bruce Barcott


	Middle earth, schmiddle earth: The view down the Wailua River valley, the impenetrable approach to Waialeale on Kauai's east side

THE DAY DRAINS like sluggish water out of the Alakai Swamp. We are woefully late and losing speed. Bill DeCosta, a local boar hunter and guide, hacks out a trail with a machete dulled from hours of cutting through vigorous cellulose. The air is cool and still. There's a threat of rain—but only a threat. A strange blue hole in the sky has hovered above us all through the swamp, like the reverse image of a tiny cartoon cloudburst following some sad character down the street. The blue hole mocks us. We came here to find rain. The rain has decided it doesn't want to be found.

Bill sets down the blade to give his wrists a rest while I scramble up the trunk of a lehua tree that's leaning like a universal NO slash across the ridgetop. My mind is on the time. What is it—three o'clock? Four? We've been stomping through dank, murky jungle to an unfamiliar rhythm. Our turnaround time has come and gone. We need to see the summit—now.

Thirty feet below me, Bill and my partners—Skip Card, an old skiing and climbing buddy, and Kike (pronounced "KEY-kay") Arnal, a Venezuelan photographer with extensive experience in the Amazon rainforest—await good news. There's none to deliver.

"Sorry, fellas," I call out. "Miles and miles of same."

The swamp ascends into the perpetual mist of Waialeale, the 5,148-foot extinct volcano at the center of Kauai, the lushest of the Hawaiian Islands. I shimmy down and slump to the ground. My legs are crosshatched with slices and scratches, but the pain comes from somewhere deep in the gut, where pride resides. This is failure, served cold. It arrives not as a dramatic mishap—that would be too face-savingly easy—but as the realization that you planned for months and came up pitifully short. Pressing on would not be courageous but foolhardy.

It's late February, perhaps the least wet time—and thus, the best window of opportunity—to attempt to reach the wettest spot on earth. In an average year, more than 460 inches of water collects in the U.S. Geological Survey's rain gauge on the summit of Waialeale (locals waffle between "WHY-ollie-ollie" and "WHY-lay-lay"). That's 38 feet of rain.

It's easy to get near Waialeale. Every year more than a million tourists come to hike the zigzag cliffs of the Na Pali Coast, snorkel with parrot fish, and lounge poolside in dozens of posh resorts that lie within 12 aerial miles of the summit. It is extremely difficult, however, to reach the peak itself. Of those million-plus visitors, the number who actually make it to the wettest spot on earth is zero. And the number of living islanders who have stood atop Waialeale can probably be counted on your fingers and toes.

The mountain rises straight up out of the east side of Kauai, a spectacular 5,000-foot headwall set back about ten miles from the coast, dripping with ferns and moss. On the west side, it slopes down into the Alakai Swamp, a dense, 34-square-mile rainforest teeming with wild boar, lehua trees, fan palms, 15 fern species, and some of the world's rarest plants and birds, including Melicope paniculata, a species of the alani, a flowering citrus shrub (of which only 110 are known to exist in the wild); and the 'o'o, a bird that hasn't been seen in more than a decade. So cloud-shrouded that its summit appears only about 20 days a year, Waialeale stands as the most inscrutable peak in the United States.

We take a GPS reading and map our position. At this rate, it will take two more days to reach the summit. If we continue on without Bill, we will get lost as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow. If Bill continues on with us, he could lose his day job down in the harbor. "I could call in sick," he offers. As soon as he says it, we all realize it's out of the question. We look at one another.

Three of the hardest words you'll ever hear: We turn around.

But in defeat we gain something more valuable: respect for da aina.

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Contributing editor Bruce Barcott lives in Seattle

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