Man vs. Wild?

If you haven't seen the Discovery channel show Man vs. Wild...it's about a guy name Bear Grylls (yes that's really his name, and he's british, with an accent and everything) who gets himself lost in survival situations and tries to survive and find civilization again. So he dumps himself on the top of the french alps, in the middle of the pacific ocean, parachutes into the costa rican rain forest, etc. It's a pretty awesome show, and while a half-day's hike in the ko'olaus isn't quite the survival trip worthy of the discovery channel, it was a fun experience. The trail starts from a rather neighborhood-ly cul-de-sac in pacific palisades and after a short walk on a paved path past a few power line towers we came to the start of the real trail, either a 5.75 mile hike along the mountain ridge to the Ko'olau summit, or a 0.75 mile trail down to Waimano waterfall. The morning was wet and rainy so we chose the ridge trail.

Uh... that's probably not a very good omen, but we don't look like buta right?

Here's a bit of the view from on top of the ridge. Since we were hiking right along the top we had great views off of both sides of the mountain.

Luckily, we found this little rest-station at the top of the ridge just as it started to pour down rain on us. Man, it was wet, cold, windy, miserable...

but we hiked on for a little bit up this ridge...

and took a look at where the trail would have led us. But it was raining too hard and we were right up in the cloud cover so the going ahead of us would have been awful. So we had to turn back.

On the very top of the ridge was an area that was burnt out by fire, but it made for some pretty cool pictures.

In fact, if it wasn't for the rain, there would've been picture opps all long the trail, but the rain made the trail slick and muddy.