Stay clear of Sacred Falls, the state warns hikers

As touted on Instagram feeds and websites aimed at adventure-hungry tourists, Sacred Falls State Park on Oahu’s Windward shore looks like an easy hike — except that you might not get there, or return alive, given the possibility of being crushed by falling, rolling boulders on the trail or in the waterfall pool, or battered and drowned by a flash flood.

The 1,376-acre park at the base of the Koolau Mountains has been permanently closed behind locked gates since an avalanche of rock killed eight people and injured as many as 50 more on Mother’s Day 1999.

Yet despite the many signs warning of omnipresent danger — boulders regularly plummet from the unstable cliffs — people keep coming, said Jason Redulla, chief of the Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement within the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, whose officers regularly patrol the area.

“We keep seeing violators up there, and people should not be going: It’s illegal and, more importantly, you’re really rolling the dice with your own life,” Redulla said. “To this day our officers are finding fresh signs of rockfall up there, and some of the boulders are the size of small cars.”

Just before Mother’s Day this month, in a ramped-up effort to warn the public as Hawaii gradually reopened some state and city parks and trails, DOCARE released a new video in which officers at the park discuss the dangers and stop and cite illegal hikers.

“We’re hoping the new video will put the message out,” Redulla said.

With the coronavirus crisis the situation feels more urgent than ever, as people flock outdoors after two months of feeling “cooped up inside,” he said.

This year officers have issued 11 citations at Sacred Falls to residents and visitors, including a quarantine-violating tourist from New York on May 1.

DOCARE agents issued more than 120 trespassing citations at Sacred Falls in 2014, according to DLNR spokesman Dan Dennison, who said that was the most recent year for which complete data was available.

Redulla said he understood “this whole COVID-19 thing and people wanting to get out, but Sacred Falls is not the place.”

In addition, he said, trespassing disrespects Hawaiian culture, in which the falls are wahi pana, a sacred space, as well as kapu, forbidden to humans.

The traditional name of the valley, stream and falls is Kaliuwaa. A trough gouged in the cliff is attributed to the pig demigod, Kamapuaa, who was “believed to have leaned against the cliff so that members of his family might climb up his body and escape their enemies,” according to “Place Names of Hawaii.”

In the 3-1/2-minute video titled “Sacred Falls — Please Turn Back!” three 20-something hikers are shown being stopped by a DOCARE conservation police officer and then leaving the area, going back out through a hole vandals had made in the fence.

Another hiker, farther up the trail, is shown being written a citation.

It shows officers walking through the forest alongside the stream, where earlier this year a slide of mud and boulders covered the area.

“Those are real people in the video,” Redulla said, noting it was recorded May 9 as events unrolled.

Because officers patrol many different natural areas, he asked the public to be responsible and avoid Sacred Falls, noting that several people residing nearby sometimes call and report if they see trespassers.

The video urges people to respect their own lives and those of the first responders who rescue hikers, treat the injured and carry out the dead as they did 21 years ago.

In addition to conducting three rescues in the last five years on the Sacred Falls trail, recent rescues of individual hikers by the Honolulu Fire Department were made on the Seven Bridges Trail in Manoa on April 22, the closed Seven Falls Trail in Manoa on May 10, and the Nuuanu Trail on Wednesday.

“Please turn around and live,” says the narrator of the Sacred Falls video, which can be viewed and shared at vimeo.com/419650794.

For a list of closed and open state parks, visit dlnr.hawaii.gov/dsp/announcements/phased-reopening-of-hawaii-state-parks-to- begin-saturday-may-2-2020.