New Year's Eve hike to Pu'u Lanihuli

On New Year's eve morning, I did this hike with my younger brother Alika.  The trailhead was on Alewa Heights Drive at Na Pueo Park.  Starting there adds some distance to the hike but eliminates having to scale a fence at the end of Heights Drive.   Additionally, because I'm an old geezer now, fence-scaling is not a wise thing to be doing.  So there.

We started hiking at just before 10 a.m. which, in hindsight, was not a wise thing to be doing but at the time I was optimistic that all would go well and we'd complete the hike before dark, which occurs about 6 p.m.

My optimism, however, was ill-conceived and eight hours after we set off on the hike, we were back at Na Pueo Park, having not reached the summit of Pu'u Lanihuli but beating darkness by about 20 minutes after have been given a pretty good beating by this tougher-than-I-realized trail.

We got to within half an hour of the summit and while we had the wherewithal to reach the summit, we doubted our wherewithal to return from the summit to the trailhead before 6 pm and the curtain of darkness.

If you look at the route map on Strava, you will see the checkered-flag finish point, which is where my iphone battery maxed out and not where ended the hike.  The pic I took of my brother is the last thing my phone was able to accomplish before it went kaput.    That being the case, the total distance of the hike was more like seven to eight miles rather than 4.4

And it was a rough seven to eight miles because neither of us has done much hiking in recent months (years?) and the trail was mucky due to recent rains.   Plus, there was a decent amount of rollercoaster up and down hiking along the way.  

But we were both glad we did the hike.