You've Gotta Break The Rules To Get To Heaven

12th February 2017 was undoubtedly one of the most incredible days of my life. In 2017 I was living in Australia. I had seen outrageously cheap flights from Sydney to Hawaii. I’d done a fair bit of solo travelling before, and to be honest I always had mixed feelings about it, sometimes its fun, but if you don’t befriend the right people it can get pretty lonely and you find yourself not doing all that much. This trip was only for a week and a half though so I figured it’d be fine.

In the week running up to my trip I had a look at various blogs and social media about what to do as a young backpacker in Hawaii, a destination who’s tourists almost exclusively comprise of rich families from the US and dreamy eyed honeymooners. I, a penniless British student with little but a backpack, was scarcely going to fit in. There was a group of backpackers around Hawaii however, mostly Australian and a handful of Northern Europeans. It was from these that I first heard of the fabled Stairway to Heaven hike. Nonplussed and indifferent, I thought the Stairway to Heaven was merely a figment of Jimmy Page’s imagination. Instead, it transpires, the Stairway to Heaven is an almost mythical hike on Hawaii’s main island, Oahu. It was an old staircase that was constructed in WWII to a top secret communications tower on the top of one of Oahu’s highest ridges. The stairs have been out of use since the 1950’s. They are technically federal property, and are illegal to climb, with authorities citing both federal trespassing laws and safety concerns on the spine tinglingly steep steps, which are often damp and slippery given Hawaii’s tropical climate.

Each year a hand full of intrepid backpackers attempt to climb the stairs, most set off in the early hours of the morning to avoid the security guard stationed at the bottom, with only a head torch for light. Few attempts are successful. There is a legal hike up to the tower, but it follows an equally treacherous ridge that is nearly impossible to climb and a hike that can take several hours. I stuffed the ideas of climbing it to the back of my mind, I had already been fined once for jaywalking since landing only 48 hours before and I thought it prudent not to get another. Instead I went and did the Diamond Head hike. It took a little under an hour and was thoroughly unsatisfying, the hiking trail had been concreted, hand rails erected, and it was busier than Times Square on Millennium New Years.

Fine, whatever, I’ll do the legal way up, I decided. The following day I set off at around 7am, I’d researched the night before how to find the start of the trail, and after alighting a bus on the outskirts of Honolulu I set off to find the Middle Ridge which lead to the tower. Two and a half hours later I still hadn’t find the right trail, I had been wondering about in a jungle that was getting increasingly thicker to no avail. I had however picked up two friends, one a native Hawaiian in his late 20s, the other a meek looking Chinese girl who spoke little English, both were trying to find the trail. Doubling back on ourselves for the third time, the Hawaiian supposed that you need to cross a small stream to get to the Middle Ridge, he spotted some wild boar tracks and suggested we follow them, apparently it would lead us to water. I was sceptical, how did he know the boar was heading for water? Either way, I was at a loss and had no better suggestions, also it felt very Steve McGarret/Hawaii Five-0, which appealed to my narcissistic side. Incredibly it worked, we found a stream and suddenly the ridge began climbing very quickly.

An hour up the ridge I began to get a bit frustrated with my companions, it was gone midday already, the bus had taken nearly an hour in the morning traffic and it had taken significantly longer to find the trail than I had accounted for. They were holding me back, I was still at least 4 hours from the top, and I had to get down as well. I asked the Hawaiian if he thought he was going to complete the trail today, he confessed he would probably come back another day now he knew where the trail was. I didn’t have this luxury of time, so I said goodbye and set off, trail blazing my way up.

The climb was extremely treacherous, at times I was hiking up a ridge which was barely a metre wide and had a drop of a few hundred metres on either side. It started to drizzle which made the mud even more slippery, there was no phone signal if I needed help and I suddenly remembered that I didn’t have any health insurance cover.

I was running out of water too, and food. I hadn’t expected the hike to take nearly this long. My legs were tired because I had waded through thick jungle for so long at the beginning. In the steeper sections, I was using ropes which had been precariously tied to trees by other hikers, I distinctly remember thinking that my life was effectively in the hands of some faceless traveller who had put them in place god knows how many years before me. By the time I made it to the top it was 4.30pm. The winter sun was quickly disappearing. The view however was sensational, if a little cloudy, I could see from one end of Oahu to the other, and the abandoned tower was impressive itself, covered in graffiti with a huge satellite dish on top. It was eerily abandoned, one wondered what important messages passed through this point, warnings of Pearl Harbour? Orders to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The reality of my situation was overwhelming the view however, I did not want to head back down that trail I had hiked up, within an hour it’d be almost pitch black, the ground was slippery in the drizzle, the ridges were narrow and precarious, and if I couldn’t navigate through that jungle in broad daylight I didn’t stand a chance at night. I seriously considered sleeping at the top of the tower, it wasn’t that cold, it had a roof, and I’d get to see the Hawaiian sunrise from a mountain top. However I had only an inch of water left in my water bottle and nothing to eat. Phone signal was non existent. I ambled around the tower and found the fabled steps. They were taped off and warning signs were posted next to them. I had little choice. My options were risk the steps and take my chances with the security guard at the bottom, risk almost certain death if I was to hike back down the way I had come up, or spend a cold and uncomfortable night sleeping on the damp concrete floor of an abandoned hut on top of one of the highest and most exposed points on Oahu, with no food, no water, wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt.

I clambered over the security tape and started to descend. The view was unbeatable. The jungle covered mountains rolled in every direction, after the jungle was a thin strip of impossibly white sand followed by the magnificent turquoise of the Pacific Ocean. The steps were at times a vertical ladder and at others they had simply been blown away in a storm.

I reached a fence at the bottom that I had to climb, and as I passed the final step I saw the security guard at the bottom. Again I was faced with a handful of options. Firstly, I could sit there until late and wait for him to leave, but I had no idea how late that will be, and by that time all the buses will have stopped running. Second, I can go and simply explain the situation to him and hope for the best, I didn’t like this option. Which left me with a final choice, I leave the steps here and head off back into the jungle and try to trek my way to the road, bypassing the security guard. To my delight it became apparent that this tactic is taken most commonly, trekkers had tagged a path through the thick bamboo forest and I was quickly led to road.

Elated, feeling invincible, adrenalin rates through the roof, I bounded on to the road. I had achieved backpacker fame, I couldn’t wait to get back to the hostel and brag about the escapades of the day, I had completed the Stairway to Heaven.

Then I came to a third fence. Damn! 12 feet high, electrified and topped with razor wire. Stark warnings read that trespasses will be prosecuted, this land belonged to the US Military. Terrified, I darted back into the relative safety of the bamboo forest, hurriedly googling how people get in and out, a forum said that someone had dug a hole under the fence further down the road. Frightened and hypersensitive to the sounds around me, I set off down the road in search of the gap under the fence. I smelt the gap before I found it, the locals had plugged it with dog poo, tonnes of it, in an attempt to discourage these outlaws from disturbing the neighbourhood. By this point however I just wanted out, kicking it out the way I combo crawled under the fence. Safely through to the other side I put my cap on low, and walked as quick as I could in to the city. I feel profoundly sorry for the person who had to sit next to me on the bus back, I must have stank of sweat, dog poo and god knows what else.

The hike took ten hours all included, and is almost certainly the greatest thing I have ever done. I regret non of it, my woeful lack of preparedness resulted in me tracking wild boar, and taking the illegal steps down. The view was sensational and the war time communications tower was haunting in the best of ways. At times I was fearful and terrified, at others awestruck and elated. The whole way I had an electrifying feeling of being the only person on a mountain in the jungle, two days flight from the UK, no phone service and risking personal safety and a felony. It turns out in Hawaii that you’ve gotta break the rules to get to heaven.

Happy Travels,

OH xx