Above The Clouds

                                     6/15/11   ABOVE THE CLOUDS

           

           

Last week I did some hiking at the 4,000-4,400 foot level of Mauna Kea, the long dormant volcano that we live at the base of.  Below the dirt road that girths the mountain lie mostly forest of Koa, Ohia, and other tropical hardwoods that are invaded by numerous, sometimes very invasive, introduced plants.  A lot of the below the road area is National Forest where the pigs, sheep, and donkeys have been removed and fenced out so the native trees can begin to re-grow.  Inside the fenced areas you can see many Koa seedlings; whereas, outside the fence, only ancient falling apart trees remain as the grazers love the young trees.   Above the road the trees grow more sparsely and more of the volcanic cinders are bare.

My companion and guide for this trip, Bob (pictured below at the Douglas monument), is a 76 year old neighbor, who was a state forest ranger/enforcement officer for many years when much of the now national forest used to be state forest.  He was able to identify many of the plants and trees, including sandalwood which nearly went extinct due to logging for export to the Orient.  I always wondered what sandalwood would smell like and I found a piece of dead wood that Bob passed to me had the aroma of spicy pine.  He also told me interesting things about a plant I already could identify, the Banana Poka. 

            Banana Poka, Passiflora mollissima, is an invasive introduction from South America that bears edible, when ripe, fruit but has larger seeds and a smaller amount of juice than the common passion fruit.  The bright yellow ripe fruits are the shape of a banana and quite eye catching hanging singly, apparently from trees that are known to NOT produce fruit.  The long vines may be sparsely leaved in low light forest till they find their way to the sun, and then they may cover the tree host till they break it or starve it of light.  But they do have beautiful pink flowers that are 4-5” across with a 4” trumpet to a round nectar reservoir.  I saw a honey creeper feeding on one of the flowers across a gulley from us.  When I looked at a flower in my hand I could not imagine how their bill could reach the nectar.  In fact there was no nectar in the one I dissected.  Bob picked five flowers and showed me that four out of the five had a small hole punched in the base of the nectar reservoir, and that is how the honey creeper feeds on them.  In fact, Bob went on to explain that the threatened native birds tended to become less numerous in areas where this invasive was brought under control, so there was less effort to control it in these upper altitudes.  Control may be impossible anyway as the pigs love to feed on the fallen ripe fruits and most of the seeds pass through them spreading them everywhere the pigs roam.  Inside the pig fenced areas the seeds are still spread by fruit eating birds.  The books describe Banana Poka vines as reaching to 60 feet but Bob and I believe that we saw some to nearly 100 feet.

We parked the car several times for short hikes.  Bob’s main focus was on the plum thickets that he remembered and in fact I believe now that is why he chose this day to ask me to drive him up there – the introduced plums were just beginning their season and he was determined to bring back a cooler full. The picture above shows plums below banana poka.  In fact, according to Bob, the plums should have been mostly ripe but even here in Hawaii seasons vary from year to year and this one is late especially at this elevation.  In fact there has been fresh snow fall atop MaunaKea each month this year lasting from a few days to a few hours.  Our first winter here our mountain had had only 4 days of snow all winter.

Our last stop was at Doctors Pit, named for David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who stopped here in 1833-4 on his way back to England from Northwest America and for whom the Douglas Fir (really a genus all its own) is named.  We parked the car and followed a weed wacked trail down the hill into a forest surrounded flat spot next to a vegetation covered pit crater.  Here there is a monument to David Douglas who died near this spot, in the pit trampled by a bull.  The story is that he was exploring with a local bull hunter as guide, when he fell into a pit that was used to catch wild cattle.  When help arrived to recover the body it was in pieces.  The bull hunter was suspected as less money was found with the body than Douglas was known to be carrying.   And, of course, there is another large plum thicket there.  I also picked and mostly ate out of hand a native kind of salmon berry that was bore fruit over 2” in diameter that is good eating from dark red to purple if you can tolerate a bitter aftertaste.  In the fenced forest 200 yards below is one of the several Sugi Pine groves from Japan that were planted for timber about 80 years ago.  Right next to the monument is a small grove of Douglas fir.  I doubt any logging will resume in this national forest unless the political climate changes drastically.  The road in is so long and bumpy that I had to drive 6-10 mph for an hour after leaving the paved summit road.

On the way back we were reminded of the difficulties of managing land in patchwork ownership.  For over a hundred years cattle have ranged the whole mountain, and in the effort to save native flora, increasing areas have been fenced to exclude the cattle, sheep and pigs.  Since the late 1940’s much of it has been put under federal management, and now, Bob thinks, there should not be any range animals.  Yet on the way in we saw manure on the road and one dead cow.  Heading out in late afternoon we saw lots of cattle, three sheep and a couple pigs.  We also saw turkeys, quail, ring necked pheasants and grouse (the biggest I’ve ever seen) which were all introduced and managed as game birds.  In addition we spotted three pairs of Nepalese Kalij pheasants that we also have a family of in the lowland forest behind our house and I’ve rarely seen at Volcanoes National Park.

Those huge grouse mentioned above live in a treeless area dominated by gorse, which is a thorny shrub imported from Scotland, to serve as fence hedge rows, but like so many plants they became an invasive nightmare that now covers thousands of acres.  A kind of tent caterpillar that eats the leaves and a weevil that eats the seed heads are being used as biological controls, and in one area it appears they have mechanically cut and windrowed the gorse between planted rows of koa trees.  Bob says there used to be lots of frogs (another introduced invasive) in some of the reservoirs in this area but we heard none and some of the reservoirs are dry.  On the way back down the mountain it started raining and has continued raining at least part of everyday since.  This year has been nearly rainfall normal.

Aloha!