The wood-burning fireplace in the dingy, barely insulated state cabin at the Lodge at Kokee on Kauai wasn’t enough to keep me warm that first night, so I had donned everything I had in my backpack: a long-sleeved shirt, a thin hoodie, two pairs of socks and a rain jacket.
It worked out, since that’s what I wound up wearing on our first hiking adventure in the state park the next morning.
It was late March, and we were standing at 4,000 feet above sea level in a dark, empty parking lot at a lookout above Kalalau Valley. There wasn’t much to see at 6:30 a.m., and it was cold. Like, 50 degrees cold. I wish I had listened to my husband, who had packed long underwear for the trip.
![/><figcaption>Planks line the trail to minimize the hikers’ impact on the environment.<br />
<em>Photo: Mallory Roe</em></figcaption></figure>
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<p>We were in Kokee, north of Waimea Canyon on Kauai’s rugged west side, for my 40th birthday. The plan was to escape the traffic and crowds of Honolulu by holing up at this state park, which sprawls over 4,345 acres and boasts about 45 miles of hiking trails through native forests and along canyon rims. The fact that there was no cell reception or Wi-Fi was another bonus.</p>
<p>It was just a weekend jaunt, so we packed as lightly as possible, filling our backpacks with hiking essentials like binoculars for birding, camera gear, granola bars, Aleve, a first aid kit and several liters of water.</p>
<p>On our must-hike list: the Alakai Swamp Trail, a roughly 7-mile hike—roundtrip and depending on where you start—through lush forests. About three and a half miles of this trail, which includes the Pihea Summit Trail that starts at the Pu‘u o Kila Lookout where we had parked our rental car, meanders along a boardwalk, a portion of which cuts through a boggy swamp on a plateau above the Napali Coast.</p>
<p>That’s really why we were here: to walk through this unique wet forest—an ecosystem zone described as “montane”—that is found nowhere else on Kauai. (There are only two other accessible bogs like this in Hawaii: one on Oahu and another on Molokai.)</p>
<p>The swamp is located on elevated flatlands near Mount Waialeale, one of the wettest spots on the planet. Because of the soggy soil and high winds here, the vegetation, including <em>ohia</em> and <em>olapa</em> trees, are stunted, some not even rising past my shoulders.</p>
<p>This bog is a strange and mysterious place, one that has been revered by Hawaiians for centuries. In fact, the swamp is mentioned in a chant that honors Waialeale: “[Kauai’s] strength radiates in awful splendor from the Alakai.”</p>
<p>Even Queen Emma, who returned to Kauai in 1870, to recuperate after the deaths of her only son and husband, made the difficult trek on horseback to the legendary swamp. The setting so entranced the queen, wrote Edward Joesting in <em>Kauai: The Separate Kingdom</em> (UH Press, 1984), she bid the dancers and musicians who traveled with her to perform here before pressing on.</p>
<p>I was enchanted.</p>
<p>We started the hike just beyond the lookout at the trailhead for the Pihea Summit Trail, an easy stroll along an eroded dirt road that follows the rim of Kalalau Valley, through a native ohia forest with <em>aalii</em> shrubs, to the peak named Pihea. Along the way are breathtaking views of the lush, amphitheater-headed Kalalau Valley about 4,000 feet below.</p>
<p>We had lucked out, too. While this area gets about 70 inches of rainfall annually, much of it concentrated between October and May, the path was relatively dry and the temperatures quickly warmed up to the point where I could shed my outer layers and hike with just a tank top on.</p>
<div style=](https://hawaiimagazine.staging.upspringsites.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/alakai2.png)
kokee.org, 
