Waimea Canyon

Why should it be a National Park?

Waimea Canyon runs ten miles through the western side of Kaua'i and drops three thousand feet, cut into the basalt of a shield volcano that has been eroding for five million years. Mark Twain is supposed to have called it the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, which he probably did not, but the name stuck because it is close enough to true. Waipo'o Falls drops eight hundred feet into it. A paved road climbs from sea level to four thousand feet along the rim.

Above the canyon sits Kōke'e, a plateau of native forest with forty-five miles of trails, and beyond that the Alaka'i, a montane bog perched near the summit of Mount Wai'ale'ale, among the wettest places measured on Earth. Endemic honeycreepers live in this forest and almost nowhere else. Walking the Alaka'i Swamp boardwalk, a person passes through a rainforest found on one island on one planet.

On the north side the plateau ends. The Nā Pali cliffs fall four thousand feet to the sea in a series of fluted ridges, and the only land route through them is the eleven-mile Kalalau Trail. The valleys behind those cliffs held Hawaiian settlements for centuries, with taro terraces still visible, and they are among the most photographed landscapes in the world.

In 1965 the National Park Service proposed tying all of it together as Kaua'i National Park: Nā Pali, Waimea Canyon, Kōke'e, and Hā'ena, in one unit. The proposal collapsed against the people who already used the land. Cabin holders with state leases in Kōke'e did not want to lose them. Hunters did not want to lose access. Sightseeing helicopter operators did not want restrictions. The lands became state parks instead, and Kaua'i has no National Park today. The proposal is sixty years old and nobody has picked it up since, which makes it perhaps the most complete National Park that America drew on a map and never built.

The 1965 proposal failed for reasons worth remembering, because they are the reasons most Hawaii proposals fail. The land in question was a patchwork of state holdings, Robinson family property, and homestead leases dating to the Territory, and the state had no appetite for handing its best upland park to Washington. Kauai got a state park system instead, which is what it still has.

Alakai above the canyon is the part scientists would fight for. It is a high plateau bog fed by four hundred inches of rain a year, where a boardwalk keeps people out of ground that will swallow a leg, and where several of the last Hawaiian forest birds hang on above the mosquito line. That line is moving uphill as the climate warms, and the birds have nowhere further to go, which makes this one of the few places on the list where the clock is measured in years rather than decades.

Na Pali gets the attention and deserves it. The Kalalau Trail runs eleven miles along cliffs to a beach with no road to it, permits are gone the day they are released, and the helicopter traffic has been argued over for years. Kauai's objection in 1965 was about who would hold the land, which is a solvable question rather than a verdict on the place: title can stay with Hawaii, as it does with the Navajo Nation at Canyon de Chelly, and the canyon, the Alakai, and Na Pali can still be recognized for what they plainly are.