TR: In May of 2019, that's the last time we actually went into the crater and could pick
berries.
Then the park shut down.
You missed the season, but that's been a traditional thing.
What Nan [Cabatbat] didn't mention is that the park has a compendium and within that
compendium (and this is directly for the Hawaiian culture) it allows people to harvest certain
items like you can harvest one gallon of ʻōhelo berries for your own personal use, as an example.
There's a number of different things like that, like what she said about picking liko,
picking the different parts of plants for making leis, that's allowed.
You're allowed to pick enough to make one lei for yourself.
So, we try to hold the tradition ourselves, when we go in the crater we will make a haku
lei for our hats.
AK: Oh nice.
Let me pull this out.
Aloha!
Thank you for being willing to sit down and chat with us.
My name is Alana Kanahele.
This is Micah [Mizukami], and we're part of the Center for Oral History at UH Mānoa.
We're doing a series of interviews with national park staff here at Haleakalā.
And as you know, this interview will be recorded, and will be stored both at Haleakalā archives
as well as the University in their online archive known as ScholarSpace.
The interview is recorded; however, after we'll send you a transcript and you can edit,
redact, delete, or add anything you would like.
You will also have the opportunity to add any pictures that you'd like along with your
archive.
There is, I guess, no direct benefit to you, and we are just really grateful that you're
willing to sit down with us.
TR: You see, that's where you're wrong.
Because part of what I'm telling you is the cultural history of this park, and I'm sharing
that cultural history with you, and you would hold that as part of your culture.
Your knowledge of it and maybe some of it you might practice.
AK: Exactly, and you know that if that all sounds okay with you.
. .
TR: Yeah.
AK: . . . then I think we'll just kind of go ahead and get started.
Would you first tell me your name and when and where you are from?
TR: Okay, well, my name is Theodore Rodrigues Jr and since my dad, Senior, was a Theodore
and was called Teddy, I was actually called Terry up until I started working for the National
Park in 1976.
And when they asked me a name for my name tag, there was already another Terry working
in the park, so I said, well, put down Ted, so since then I've become Ted Rodrigues.
So, I was born here on Maui in a place called Pā‘ia and my first three years of life
were spent there.
And my parents, they moved to Haʻikū and this is where I grew up in the country near
a plantation town called Rice Camp.
And at that time that was a community within itself, except for a dispensary or hospital,
it had everything that you needed and there was no need for you to go anyplace else.
I started in 1976 and just prior to that I was an unemployed person trying to make a
living commercial fishing, and I applied for a job up here and got a seasonal position
as an interpretive park ranger.
I worked in that division and at that time the division of interpretation was the same
as law enforcement and resource management.
A job opening came up for a backcountry ranger.
I said, this is what I want to do.
I applied for it, and I did get it for the seasonal park ranger.
In that position in 1983, it was opened up as a permanent position.
I applied for it, and I became a permanent law enforcement park ranger still in resources
management and still interpretation.
From there, most of the work that I did was all backcountry work, but most of it was resource
management.
I did everything else: interpretation, the law enforcement, checking camping permits,
checking cabin permits, helping with search and rescue, helping people out that needed
help for whatever reason.
It may be on occasion having to take someone out on horseback because of an illness or
a sprained ankle or something like that.
But the majority of my job was in resources management, and this was managing the goat
population in the crater.
So there’s the pigs and setting up some of the first trap lines to trap mongoose and
cats to help protect the nēnē.
AK: So does the backcountry refer specifically to Kīpahulu area?
TR: Well, yes, but in this sense, we're just staying with what at that time was called
the Crater District, now called the Summit District, and we're just speaking about the
depression of Haleakalā Crater.
And within that crater, there were approximately close to thirty miles of public hiking trails,
two campgrounds and three public cabins.
And they wanted someone to be back there most of the time to assist with visitor needs,
as well as to take care of the basic needs of the facilities as well as the trails which
I did.
AK: Did you live in Kīpahulu or Hāna?
TR: Kīpahulu was another district and they had their own staff to take care of their
needs.
But eventually my responsibilities included the Kīpahulu District and this became more
important when I was given the opportunity to move from the law enforcement division
to resources management.
When this occurred, my responsibilities increased and backcountry work remained the same.
I became responsible for the park fences and the removal of the feral ungulates or animals
in the crater, including axis deer, and that's where I retired from in 2010.
Yeah, so most of the fences were in place.
This was started primarily by Ron Nagata, he was a resource management specialist and
later became Chief of Resource Management.
But not all the fences was in place when I gained responsibility, and to manage the goats
in particular—they were the most numerous and most harmful—you had to have fences.
No matter how many animals you took out, they kept coming in.
There were literally thousands of goats just outside the park just waiting to come in.
So once the Summit District became totally enclosed, then we could effectively really
work and manage these animals.
AK: Is this kind of what a typical fence line would look like?
The one behind us.
TR: Yes.
What we see back here is a forty-seven inch hog wire fence.
It has a strand of barbed wire on the top.
Barbed wire is usually placed on the top for additional height.
Barb wire was made to keep the animals like cattle and horses from leaning over - it wasn't
really meant to keep animals from jumping over because an animal jumping over don't
know that it's barbed wire.
So it's a wire that is learned, an animal learns to avoid it, like cattle and horses,
but that was a convenient material to use.
So at one time this was all ranch land on the opposite side and they still have barbed
wire at the top of the fence.
It became a standard throughout the park to put up a strand to extend the height of the
fence.
Not that goats really needed it or pigs needed it, it was because of the deer.
Deer can easily jump fences up to eight feet high.
The higher you make it the less likely they will jump.
Unfortunately, the barbed wire (because of its barb) was very detrimental to native birds
and non-native birds, they would become impaled on it.
And what most people don't realize is at the top of the mountain we had Hawaiian bats and
they would become impaled, not very many but just a few was enough to make us decide to
remove all the barbed wire.
So that's still here along Hosmer’s Grove boundary fence, hasn't been a problem, but
the rest of the park does not have barbed wire on top of the fences.
AK: Is there a string of barbed wire on the bottom?
TR: That was tried and that was to keep pigs from rooting under, and what we learned was
that does not stop pigs from going underneath the fence.
So that was eliminated.
And instead of that, we would put what we call an apron, which is simply described as
another piece of hog wire fence instead of the forty-seven inches high, it was generally
about thirty-two inches wide.
And this was laid on the ground and connected to the bottom of the fence, and this way the
pigs could not get in and underneath, nor the goats nor the deer.
In fact, they don't like the wire at all, the pigs.
They'll root right up to the wire and stop.
And with all the irregularities on the land, that hog wire really helped to cover many,
many of the holes.
And that's the standard now.
All the fences that's built will have an apron and then, of course, these techniques have
been looked at and applied by other agencies to help these people to protect their land,
the Department of Land and Natural Resources and The Nature Conservancy.
I'm not sure how much fences there are today.
I've been gone for eleven years, but when I was responsible for it, there were at least
fifty miles of fences.
They were boundary fences, there were internal management fences, there were enclosure fences,
enclosure fences was to keep.
. . . it essentially began when there were still animals in the park, and they enclosed
certain areas to study and see what would come back if you kept these goats out, some
interesting things was learned.
One that I was privileged to enclose, we call Puʻu Māmane inside of Haleakalā crater,
and this was a goat problem area, so when they closed it, a mint started to grow, a
native mint.
They knew about the mint, it was not found in the crater, it was considered gone from
the crater, extinct, so to speak from the crater, but found elsewhere.
But the seeds were still there and it started to grow.
And there it was in that enclosure unexpectedly, you know and that was one small example of
what could happen by enclosing the park and removing these feral animals.
Another plant that I found far more common but was never seen in the crater was the ʻāweoweo.
ʻĀweoweo is a fish in the ocean, but it's also a plant on the mountain and actually
grows lowlands too, but the plant has the smell of the fish, ʻāweoweo, and the goats
love it.
And you never saw it, and this plant started to grow.
And nearby in the Puʻu Māmane enclosure and nearby on another cinder hill and you
started to see it.
And then the seed started to spread and I started to see it elsewhere.
ʻĀweoweo, I never saw it in crater!
Years of going in and out of the crater, walking all over the place, I never saw it and here
it was coming up.
AK: Was it like a weed?
TR: No, it's not a weed, it's a little shrub, but it's an endemic plant, native to Hawaiʻi,
found no place else but Hawai‘i.
Another place that we built an enclosure out of necessity.
. . . I was with Steve Anderson, who was in charge of the Vegetation Management Program
in Resources Management, and we were in the process of determining a fence line on what
we call Cable Ridge.
It's actually a ridge on a gulch called ʻŌpelu gulch and this is in Kīpahulu, and this ridge
is one of the walls on the southern side of Kīpahulu Valley that goes down to the boundary
of the park near the ocean—not at the ocean but near the ocean—and there is a heavy
infestation of pigs in that area, and some goats but pigs really, really bad.
So we went in there to make an assessment as to where this fence could go and not only
to where it can go but we're looking at the plants because we do not want to disturb native
plants.
Or if there are plants that are rare, we wanted to make sure they get inside of the fence.
The land next to us was the state land.
We were in communication with the State of Hawaiʻi, the Department of Land and Natural
Resources, and they were totally in favor of that fence and protecting their area, too.
So if we did find things of value, we could negotiate with them to protect the plants,
but as it turned out, we were walking up that ridge and inside the park area, looking down
the steep slope, I told Steve, “What is that plant from prehistoric times?”
I'm not a botanist.
I don't know the plants.
He looked at it.
“Oh, my God, that plant is extinct from Kīpahulu Valley.
It was last described back in the 1950s in the upper part of Kīpahulu Valley.”
He couldn't believe it.
It was surviving on a little rocky cliff where the pigs and the goats could not get it.
So it was a cyanea.
They say the Hawaiian plants evolve here without predators, so they kind of lost their methods
of protection from browsing animals like thorns.
But this was a plant that still had thorns—not sharp ones—but still had thorns, and it
was on the leaf and stems.
It was really, really interesting, and so I called it a prehistoric plant, not knowing
what it was.
Our trip focus changed to studying the area a little bit more.
We had to use ropes to get around to look at that area to see if there was more cyanea,
and to deciding how to fence that off immediately.
And then we continued with our project.
As soon as possible Steve sent in more botanists to evaluate the entire area, but no other
cyanea was found.
And so we did a quick fence around it.
And before we could build the Cable Ridge fence as we call it, as soon as we fenced
off those, keikis started to come up, babies started to come up.
That was pretty amazing.
And then eventually when there's enough to collect seeds, they could germinate seeds
for out planting in other protected areas.
So, when you have fifty miles of fences built in some very, very difficult terrain and long
distances from roads, it's really fun to inspect them and very challenging.
You have to be physically fit and dedicated and not afraid of heights.
And these fences had to be inspected on a regular basis.
Depending on the nature of the problems in the area, mainly the feral animals or places
where they might have more water damage like Kīpahulu Valley or some of the other wetter
areas, dry areas with rockfalls with landslides, we would have to increase the frequency of
inspections.
So some fences had to be inspected at least once a month at the very minimum.
And other than that, with what staff we had, we had a schedule that all the fences would
be inspected throughout the year.
Any time there was a storm that came through, every inch of fence had to be inspected depends
where the storm was, usually the whole of Maui.
And we needed to sometimes accelerate that inspection by hiring a helicopter.
AK: In areas that were prone to flooding or rockfalls, was there any kind of redesign
of the fence in terms of like a breakaway or something that could help alleviate that
issue?
TR: Yeah, when they first built fences and going through water drainages, they built
what they called breakaways.
Every drainage in each stream anywhere have debris.
And as debris, debris comes down and it meets something like a net, like a fence, it catches
on the net.
And pretty soon you have a dam and pretty soon the dam has a backload of water and more
debris and everything else.
And now you have a big hole in the fence.
So it wouldn't take the whole fence out but it would take out that section that's in the
stream.
But now, you had a hole.
And the park has hundreds of these drainages, hundreds of them throughout the park.
You cannot check them out in time, in time to stop pigs from entering, in time to stop
goats from entering.
Because once these animals get in, even though it might be a few, their reproductive potential
is so great and in a relatively short time their population grows so big and their impact
is tremendous.
I can speak of that from experience.
So it is critical that these fences get fixed right away or we come up with better ideas.
And so myself, and the staff that I had, and I'm sure there were many three am moments
at night when I got up with ideas and I'm sure some of my staff had the same.
We came up with a number of different designs and solutions, and the best solution was to
take the fence to a natural barrier.
And so if you can find a waterfall in a stream, you normally would find a cliff and that would
become a natural barrier.
That became the first thing to do is find and describe the stream that had natural barriers
and start building fences, the fences to these natural barriers.
That, of course, is very effective.
But not every stream had waterfalls near where existing fence lines occurred.
So we had to come up with different ideas.
One of the innovative ones we came up with was just understanding animals.
Now, you had fences to maintain, inspect, we needed people who knew how to build fences,
you got to work with wire with their hands, strong—males or females, didn't matter.
But because you're also doing feral animal control, basically you had to have the skills
of an avid hunter.
And if you are one, in most cases, you would have grown up in a culture of hunting where
you only harvest what you need.
You never shoot the females, you certainly don't shoot the babies, and you certainly
don't shoot the pregnant ones.
Take males when you can, and you only take what you can use.
Here, different story.
We're trying to protect the keikis that are not four-footed.
These are the plants and animals and the birds—well, birds have two feet.
And so we had to find people who had all the skills of fence building, etc.
We had people who were good outdoors, that could work in harsh environments and live
outdoors in harsh environments, physically fit, and they had to have a very good understanding
of why we're doing this work.
They had to have a strong understanding of how precious the natural resources was here
at Haleakalā Crater and if you didn't have it, you had to teach
them.
You have to show them.
And they needed the skills to manage the animals.
They needed the skills to read the signs of animals.
But just because you have a break in the fence, you're not going to see the animal, but you
might see the signs.
In fact, that's what you're going to see first is the signs—whether it's droppings, tracks,
or bushes that had been moved or a tree that's being rubbed by horns, or a fern that's been
ripped off by a boar or pig with short tusks.
So that was challenging and this park has had a number of really good crews working
and doing that.
So going back to the streams (laughs).
Think about these feral animals, think about yourself.
If you're going in one direction and you come up to a wall and you can't see the other side,
you can climb over the wall.
What are you going to do?
Not go.
Simple.
Same with the animals.
If you cannot see where they're going, they're not going.
They're not going to go up.
So what you do is you put a barrier across the stream that covers their vision, that
keeps them from seeing what's on the other side.
So we came up with a thing called a curtain—call it a big tarp.
We've covered this stream up with a tarp, that's all.
Take two strong posts on both sides and we run a cable across and high above the high
water mark and put a piece of fabric across laying it downstream far enough that if they
come upstream, they have to step on the tarp and they can't go anywhere, because there
is a big wall called a tarp, and they don't know what that is, and they don't go, and
it worked.
And so this became one of the primary things we started doing in a lot of streams without
natural barriers.
The other thing, too, is if you come to a place that you cannot walk, like a natural
barrier would be one of them, it'll stop you from walking.
What do you do in a stream to keep an animal from walking upstream and downstream?
In this case all our streams are from the mountain to ocean.
So it's walking upstream.
Well, ranchers figured it out a long time ago.
And everybody sees it, most people sees it at one time or another.
It's called a cattle guard.
They put across the road.
We crossed one on the way, coming up to the park.
These pieces of metal that went across the road covering a trench made it look dangerous
and would stop a cow from crossing.
That keeps cattle from walking across for the most part, also other four-footed animals
like horses.
Now you can put a cattle guard across the stream, but a goat will go through that no
problem walking across that, you know, they're very agile they can walk across that pretty
easily.
So, you have to redefine that cattle guard—we call it stream guards.
And we made it such that the bars have basically have no service on the top for them to stand
on.
They were pointed.
Imagined a road being a stream and you take that cattle guard and turn it around and face
it so the bars are running parallel with the water.
And if you put that in a place that has some degree of drop.
You can go underneath, but you cannot go through, and that worked.
And we did a number of those in streams in Kīpahulu Valley and elsewhere.
And so that was one way that we resolved most of the stream problems.
All the structures are built about mid 1980s and later.
Almost all of these structures, structures are still in place and still working.
The curtains would wear out, so you'd have to replace them and because the curtains were
not a tarp that you'd just buy from the store, we had them specially fabricated, done by
a local shop here, a shop that made awnings and sails and things like that.
And we purchased a fabric that was approved for water systems called hypalon.
And we would give this lady the dimensions and she would fabricate it with the grommets
and deliver it to us and that made our job so much easier (chuckles).
AK: What were some of the, if you don't mind maybe holding this up in reference to park
map what were some of the more difficult areas of fencing with the terrain?
TR: You want to see the picture?
AK: Sure, I think it might be upside down.
TR: A lot of places was so difficult to build fences that management went outside the park
for assistance and in other words, we went to private landowners and talked with them
and negotiated and came up and with agreements to build fences on their land.
Yeah, through a cooperative agreement with that private land owners.
This fence right here is one of those.
And it's here because of the campground, not because of the difficulty in building fences.
So, this fence goes around the campground and then comes back up to the park boundary
and then continues.
TR: What's on the other side of the fence?
Who is it owned by?
TR: The lands that we're on belongs to Haleakalā Ranch, and they have an agreement with The
Nature Conservancy here on Maui to manage the land.
It's called the Waikamoi Preserve.
And Haleakalā Ranch was purchased by basically the Baldwin family many years ago.
And they actually bought it from a Hawaiian chief who was a high-ranking chief in Kamehameha's
Army.
And Kamehameha gave him that land, the land of Kalailinui, and that's here.
It goes all the way across to Hāna Mountain.
So, that's the land that you see here.
And that's a real brief history.
You know, the original Hawaiian land during the time of Kamehameha and then much, much
later in the late 1800s was purchased by basically the Baldwin family and others.
And that's where it stands.
Yeah.
And they themselves have a ranch that is very conservation-minded and really respects and
understands the natural environment of Hawaiʻi.
The uniqueness of it and has also allowed The Nature Conservancy to manage this land
for preservation.
They still take water from the land, the ranch.
Yeah, they have their own water system from this land.
So some places in the park—many places in the park—the boundaries go down cliffs.
And I will say you can build a fence anywhere, you can.
It is just a matter of time and more important money.
You can build a rock wall around the crater, it just takes time and money (laughs).
These are not realistic things.
So where we could avoid building, a lot of places we avoided building on cliffs, by negotiating
with the landowners--- Kaupō Ranch was another important ranch that really helped the park
that way.
In other areas, we just had to build fences on cliffs.
There was no choice.
So when I mentioned earlier about having a fence crew with good fence building skills,
good hunting skills, guess what?
These people had to have good climbing skills.
Most did not come with it.
They received training through the national parks.
They all went to rope rescue training and they had to man up and became part of the
team to help law enforcement with search and rescue.
And so we would have, as part of our own criteria, training, we would have professionals come
and give us some training classes for ropes.
I can tell you a story about that, but that's in American Samoa with the National Park of
American Samoa (laughs).
AK: Yeah, that would be great.
So I actually had a question about the fence.
How deep did the post go?
TR: Well, that's a standard thing.
When you buy a T-post from the store, there's an industry standard for posts.
The posts that you see here is the Class 3 galvanized post.
The Class 3 galvanized post is the best galvanization you can put on a post for corrosion protection.
It's called T133, which means for every foot it weighs one pound and you can get in various
heights.
These here look like they're about five feet tall.
Actually, they were six-and-a-half foot posts.
At the bottom of the post, there's a spade that's riveted to the post and this spade
goes into the ground, the top of the spade in the ground is as deep as you want to put
the post.
So that depth would be about eighteen to sixteen inches.
It depends on the manufacturer.
And that's as far as you go.
Now, when you're building a fence on solid rock, you have to take the spade off, but
you don't have to go down that deep.
You have to drill a hole in the rock and get it down to maybe about ten inches, at least
ten inches.
And that's pretty solid.
AK: And are they.
. . . they look like ten feet apart?
How far apart are the posts specifically?
TR: Yeah, the standard distance in basic fence building is ten feet between poles.
Um, where does that come from?
Just come from ranching---we're talking cattle and horses.
Yeah.
This is what is needed to basically learn to keep large animals like that from pushing
the fence over.
It doesn't have to be that distance.
It can be closer, it can be longer.
I've helped.
. . . when opportunity presented itself, I would go in and watch a professional fence
builder build a fence, and I watched this one crew build a deer fence which is eight
feet high.
All the main posts, the solid corner posts, was made out of pipe—three inch galvanized
pipe—and in between was the standard T133 galvanized T-posts.
There distance was fifteen feet and depending on the lay of the land, you can only stretch
a certain amount at a time.
In this case they showed me how to stretch the rows of wire.
A roll of wire at that time with three hundred and thirty feet, they stretched out five rows
of wire at one time, really interesting.
I learned a lot and they did, eight-foot-high fence and you can do the math, 330 times five.
But here, here in the park, in the land that we have where it's not necessarily flat, in
fact it's mostly irregular.
And in the rainforest it's even worse and it's muddy, it's softer and a stretch of five
feet is sometimes it's all you can do.
And sometimes your posts had to be only two feet apart just to hold the fence up and keep
the posts in the ground.
Sometimes when you talk about how deep do you put a post, swampy areas especially, you
take a post and you pound it as deep as you can but leave it enough so you can tie the
next post to it and then you pound the next post, so the post would keep standing.
So it does vary.
But basically, wherever the spade ends at about sixteen inches, that's where you stop.
I'm losing my voice.
AK: After you drink water, can you maybe talk about what was entailed in a fence crew because
they were out there for several days or a week at a time, right?
TR: Yeah.
Excuse me.
Places like the front country where you could walk to these places and do it, in the backcountry
depending on where it was.
. . . Let's just go to Hāna Mountain.
That's totally outside of the crater and the park boundary, very difficult to get to.
There are old trails that can take you there that we know about that we use for our maintenance
work, some of them horse trails and some of them not.
Very difficult to take all your tools and equipment on your back and your food and you
camp gear.
So we would utilize helicopters and they would fly us in and drop us off and we would sling
in the gear in sling loads and drop us off, and we would spend a week in the mountain
in tents, in places very remote where we went to frequently, we would build shelters.
In some places we would just build a wood platform on the ground that would take us
off the mud and we'd put a tent on and in some places we would actually build a structure.
It's really important when you're working all day in the mud, in the rain, and you're
soaking wet from the rain and soaking wet from the sweat, you need a place to go that's
dry.
And so the park did invest in a number of facilities like that, where our crew of four
could be comfortable and stay healthy.
So in these locations, every one, every one of them, we have to make sure there was a
way to get out.
You could walk out in a day.
And so these places were chosen specifically where a helicopter could get to our campsite
with minimal disturbance to the environment and centralize the work that needs to be done.
And if a storm comes in and you can't get out or it's just too cloudy and we can't get
out by helicopter, we can walk out.
We have walked out.
AK: Where would you walk out from?
TR: Depends on where you are.
In some places you walk out through Haleakalā Crater and normally you come up through Halemauʻu
trail.
In some places you need go out through Kaupō Gap, through Kaupō Ranch and pray that somebody
will come and get you.
In Kīpahulu Valley used to hike all the way down to ‘Oheʻo, yeah, and that's quite
a challenge, could be quite a challenge.
Yeah.
And building these fences, all that material has to be flown in.
We were lucky that we had helicopters to carry that material for us and we would strategically
place.
. . . the line was predetermined, was brushed open, only what was needed to build the fence.
And every site was marked and we would place people in the field to receive the loads—the
material loads—and all these loads would be pre-prepared, wait, stay within the limits
of the aircraft, and we would fly to the site.
When we were finished, and there were things that had to be removed that way, in the places
that was open enough, brush area was okay, grasslands would be fine, ridges that's all
rocky, we would actually use the helicopter to unroll the wire.
And so you had to have somebody on the ground to receive the load.
We built our own device with the help of the helicopter company and the approval of the
Office of Aircraft Safety.
We built our own device to carry these rolls of wire, unroll them, come back, and they
would have another device ready to go.
So as fast as the helicopter could fly in and unload the wire, we were unrolling fence
wire, so we would literally roll hundreds and hundreds of feet of fence at a time, and
then the job started.
AK: Which of the fence lines did you work on?
TR: All of it.
AK: All of them.
TR: Yeah, the only one I haven't done anything, I haven't worked on the fence there, was the
new lands in Nakula.
This is here, this blue line.
Yeah, Nakula.
The park acquired the property while I was still working, and there was a great amount
on the lower portion, there were a lot of fences already established by the ranchers
for cattle ranching and I did not build a fence there, but I helped with the beginning
parts of it.
So in order to build these fences, you have to know what was there in terms of existing
fences.
It was better to build along existing fences than building new ones, in terms of just disturbing
the land.
So every foot of fence that we could find in Nakula was GPS'd, and it was one of the
things that I did.
And where we didn't have fences, we began studying the terrain to see where would be
the best places to go.
So I left the park before that, before that part actually really started, and Timmy Bailey
had to take it over and do it, and they've done some of it.
And also the state themselves had land adjacent to the park land and worked in conjunction
with Haleakalā to build the best fence possible in the most unforgiving terrain.
So other than that, I've worked on every foot of fence that you see there, I have walked
it all, more than once.
AK: Could you talk about some of the place names?
Are these traditional place names that they're using here on the map with the fence lines
or are they renamed?
TR: Yeah, the names came with the people that kind of worked on those locations.
Ron Nagata was one of the most influential people helping to establish these management
units in fence locations.
Well, when you look at this map and you see in the bogs of Hāna Rainforest, a place called
Smith Camp Shelter---well, Mr. Smith was a contractor to build the first fence there,
and he needed a shelter.
I wasn't working in Resource Management at the time, so, he was honored with the name
of Smith Camp.
Frisbee Shelter, which is in the state land, I cannot speak for this state, but I guess
they played frisbees there.
Other names like Palikea Camp is a camp, a place along the stream of Palikea which goes
down into Kīpahulu to ‘Oheʻo Stream.
Fern Camp just happened to be a spot that was a really nice flat land with ferns, so
we called it Fern Camp.
Ginger Camp was one of the first places that had a really serious problem with Kahili ginger.
Yeah, I mean, Kahili ginger is like a cancer in the rainforest it grows over and destroys
everything on the ground.
It displaces all the native and endemic and indigenous plants.
So they call that camp Ginger Camp, and the camp was built for that purpose.
Nearby, they needed another camp because of the distances involved and they called it
ʻOhe Camp, and that was the first place in Kīpahulu Valley that they found the native
bamboo, called ʻohe. ʻOhe is bamboo and that's an endemic bamboo.
AK: How did they name the cabins?
Do you know how they named the cabins: Palikū, Hōlua, and Kapalaoa?
TR: Now, we get into the crater.
AK: Yeah, sorry we can keep it in Kīpahulu first.
TR: That's a whole different story and I have my own opinions on that.
AK: Okay, well, we'll keep with the back country first.
TR: There are three cabins in the crater.
These cabins were built in the 1930s with the WPA, Workers Progress Administration,
the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps.
My dad was in the CCC and he worked in 1938 and he was one of the men that helped build
the Palikū Cabin.
Just a little bit of history about that, Hōlua with the first cabin built and started in
1934, and they had to build trails first.
WPA played a really important part in that with the Halemauʻu trail.
Three cabins in the crater Hōlua Cabin, Kapalaoa Cabin and Palikū Cabin.
I always question why do they call Hōlua, Hōlua Cabin?
Hōlua is the game of sledding.
It doesn't happen in the crater.
If you know anything about the Hawaiian culture and tradition of sledding it was quite a project
to create a sledding structure.
You need banana leaves and ti leaves and hōlua.
No, it's not hōlua.
Nobody could tell me why.
It wasn't a place of sledding.
So what I learned, and I learned through reading old documents, that place, that area is a
place where the sister to Pele, the goddess—what is her name?
The goddess of the winds.
La‘amaomao?
Well she's the goddess of the winds and it is there with her ipu, her gourd, that she
released the winds of ho‘olua.
That is the name of the place, Ho‘olua.
It's "H" with the ʻokina, I don't know what you call that, H-O-O-lua.
What is that, what kind of a wind is that?
The ho‘olua winds is found in many places.
But when I read that, oh, it's like a light bulb went off because I've spent a hundred
nights or more in Hōlua and I've been there when the ho‘olua winds blow and when the
ho‘olua winds blow, it is a contradictory wind: powerful, strong.
It comes through the north/northeast and it comes across the crater and it hits the palis
of Kilohana and Kalahaku, and it tumbles and it rolls and it just rushes down the Koʻolau
Gap, past the cabin that we call Hōlua, and this horrendous wind turns everything over.
And then it stops.
And then another one comes.
And then another one comes, and it wakes you up at night.
It's a very, very powerful wind.
AK: La‘amaomao and the Kaipumakani, the wind gourd?
TR: Thank you.
So that's the name of that place, Ho‘olua.
Now, that makes sense.
And it's one of the beauties about the Hawaiian culture and their language is when they name
a place, it had a meaning.
There was a reason why they gave it the name, it usually had a meaning.
Palikū.
What is Palikū?
What does that mean?
You read the park literature, it's a standing cliff, vertical cliff, but the whole of Haleakalā
Crater have vertical cliffs!
It does, everywhere is Palikū.
But no, Palikū is one place in the crater.
And it wasn't where we call Palikū today.
It's a beautiful name for the place because it is very sheer cliffs that's behind the
cabin.
But the true Palikū was below the mountain of Haleakalā—and I'm not talking about
the mountain we call Haleakalā today, but the Haleakalā that the Hawaiians called Haleakalā.
And the cliffs below Haleakalā is Palikū.
And where is that?
That's on the western face of the Kaupō Gap in a place called Waikane, where the springs
of Waikane exists, that's right here.
So what is the name of Palikū?
Palikū could fit in almost anywhere in the crater, you know, but Palikū was across and
in Kaupō Gap.
The name of the area where we have Palikū cabin is called Waikeakeʻia that is the name
of the place.
And what it means is "this is where the clouds gather".
And if you spend any time at Palikū, that's where the clouds come and you get wet, and
that's what it is.
But it's been lost in time.
Kapalaoa cabin, what does that mean?
We mispronounce it.
It's Pala‘ao, Kapala‘ao.
I don't know.
My dad used to call the place Windgate.
Windgate for Superintendent Windgate, who was the Superintendent at the time when they
were building the cabin, but that's not the name of the place.
But an older man—I don't remember his first name, his last name was Duvauschelle; he's
an old Hawaiian, Duvauschelle, well known on the island of Moloka‘i.
But here on Maui, in a field near Haleakalā Ranch, I met him at Kapalaoa/ Kapala‘ao
one day and he told me, “Teddy this is not Kapalaʻao, this is Waipala‘ao.
It is Waipala‘ao for the spring that exists there, and that is the spring that feeds the
cabin, that's the name of the place.”
That's what he said.
But Kapalaoa is a very nice name for that place.
The Pala‘au, is actually a feature that's outside the national park.
And that feature is here.
It is a place called Pu Alikolua ʻo Kane.
The pala‘au is is an ornament that the ali‘i wore, it's of a particular shape made out
of ivory, usually out of the bone of whale or the tooth of a whale.
That's the Pala‘au and that's the name of this area.
And you can only see the Pala‘au if you are in Kahikinui, Waiʻōpai.
Nakula not so much.
But it's mainly in Kahikinui on this southwestern part of Maui.
And when you look up the mountain, you can see the shape of the pala‘au, and that area
got its name, Pala‘au.
AK: And it's just a natural feature?
TR: Yes, a natural feature.
AK: Sorry, what is a cliff face or what was the.
. .
TR: It's part of a rocky face.
This is like a depression in the ridge at Haupa‘akea . And because it was a low point,
it also was one of the major trails that the Hawaiians used.
They—Hawaiians—came from Nu‘u from Waiʻōpai to enter the crater, that's where they came
through, through that notch.
AK: Is that trail still there?
TR: The Hawaiian trail is there but you cannot see it.
But, you know it's there because of the ahu, and it can be a single stone.
In many places, I've seen its trail throughout the park and elsewhere.
And so you can see where they went by their markers, and the ahu, the stone pile, one
on top another, or just one single stone standing on another stone.
It's as simple as that.
There's so many stories about that place, about the whole of it.
So, that is the names today, nice names, and it doesn't necessarily describe the place.
At Hōlua or Ho‘olua, there is a spring.
That spring runs water all year round and feeds the cabin; it has never run out of water.
The spring at Waipala‘ao runs all year round but it varies and it does feed the cabin.
Palikū does not have a spring, but near Palikū is another place, called La‘ea.
The flats of La‘ea and Pu‘u La‘ea - up on the cliffs with the spring of La‘ea.
And La‘ea with a demi god and that is where he lived in that area.
And the cave of La‘ea is nearby.
AK: Are there are other areas where the names have been lost in time that you're aware of?
TR: A lot of the names have been lost in time and every area throughout the island, actually,
but let's talk about the crater, but every place as you go through the crater had a name.
And, of course, there were reasons for it.
And good example of this is at Waikekehia at Palikū.
Just below that is a place called Waipane, Waipane is not a spring, it was a depression,
that held water.
It was like a lake, Waipane, like Waiʻānapanapa, not Waiʻānapanapa along the coast which
has its own little lake cave, but Waiʻānapanapa up in the mountains is another lake.
Well, we call it lake, but on the mainland it wouldn't be called a lake.
Anyway, Waipane is in the flats and it would fill up with water at one time and that's
how it got its name.
Nobody knows about that and nobody will ever see it again because there was a lava tube
under there, a small one, and it finally broke through and it's like a big bathtub, all of
the water drains down into the lava tube now and never fills.
AK: And where did you say that one was?
TR: It's just below where the Palikū cabin is, down in the horse pasture.
Here.
Just below that is a place called Pohaku Loa.
And just below it is another place called something else, and there's another place
called something else, and it just goes on and on.
So it's really interesting because this names had meaning to the places, which is part of
the culture of the Hawaiian people that share with us today.
Another one that I found quite interesting was here in the Ko‘olau Gap in the crater,
we call it Silversword Loop.
Silverswords have really spread out since goats have been controlled, but silversword
loop at one time was one of the best places where people could actually go see silverswords.
They have another name for that place.
It's called Ke‘ahuakaholo and I ask people what it means.
Nobody can tell me what it means.
You know some Hawaiian, can you tell me what it means?
Ke‘ahuakaholo?
Ke‘a—white, hua—seed, holo—to travel.
Silverswords, does that say something?
It's called Ke‘ahuakaholo, Silversword Loop that's what the map shows.
But if you were in the crater, as the Hawaiians were, and you were in the crater many times,
you would see how the silversword seeds—the hua—travelled.
Over time, you would see the plant flowers once in a lifetime, sometimes a decade, sometimes
longer two or three decades, and they die.
But if you came by often enough, you would see that same plant that grew and flowered
and have keiki, the hua, the seed that travelled and was growing, and you will see that the
seeds travel.
They travelled with the wind and that's how they travel.
My Hawaiian friend told me that, I took him in the crater one day.
I said, “What this means?”
Well, that's how the seed was travelled, Ke‘ahuakaholo, that's how they travelled.
Right there, it shows you.
And Ke‘ahuakaholo tells you and share with us how extensive the silversword population
was in Haleakalā crater, because really the entire crater was called Ke‘ahuakaholo,
not just there at silversword loop.
AK: Oh really?
TR: Yeah, and people have forgotten that.
People don't know that.
It's got an interesting, really interesting story.
The whole of the floor of the crater is really Ke‘ahuakaholo and shows you how the silversword
travels.
I like that one.
AK: What about the name Haleakalā?
TR: When they were.
. . . Haleakalā became a park in 1916.
The history, you can look it up, part of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park.
There was nobody here, there were no roads, only trails, no rangers.
I'm not sure when the first rangers came, late 1920s perhaps.
I know that my great grandfather helped build the road up here, and that's when people started
to come up.
This would be in the late 1920s, certainly before they started building the cabins.
So Haleakalā back then, they were studying and doing place names of the mountain, and
I'm sure that's how some of these names came about, and they interviewed many people, some
Hawaiians, Native Hawaiians.
And there was one Hawaiian man in Paʻuwela down in Haʻikū that they interviewed, and
they asked him, “What is the name of the mountain?”
“The mountain has four names.
We see four mountains up there.
We don't see one mountain, Haleakalā is one mountain, Haleakalā is here.
That is Haleakalā Mountain.
This is Kilohana, this is Hanakauhi, and this is Kuiki, those are the mountains.”
But today we call it Haleakalā, a very appropriate name.
But really, it was called---I can't remember because it had several names, it meant For
the sun to travel, not the house of the sun, but how the sun travelled.
I can't remember right off hand.
Kealahele, something like that.
That was the name of the mountain.
There is one nice practice, one cultural practice, that gives credence to the mountain of Haleakalā.
And this comes from the people that live in Kīpahulu, Hāna, Lelekea.
In Kīpahulu there is a Heiau called Kanikauila and at the time of the summer solstice, they
would go to Kanikauila to watch the sunrise and do their pule.
And what do you do when you watch the sunrise?
You face the sun.
No, you do not face the sun when it rises from the horizon.
You turn around and you face Haleakalā and you look at the mountain of Haleakalā and
the first rays will come and hit the mountain of Haleakalā.
You will not see the sun, but the mountain will.
And you turn around and then you will see the sun rise.
And that is the tradition that is still practiced today.
But this Haleakalā mountain, we call it Haleakalā peak, so we take some of its credence.
Yeah.
Another name, here's a name I heard from my dad, he would talk about going into the bushes,
about me going into the bushes.
He would say, “You're going into the Kawaos”.
And though it's commonly used by a lot of people, kawaos, the meeting with the bushes.
It was commonly said by cowboys because they are usually up in the mountains going in the
bushes, so okay, I'm going to the Kawaos.
Little did I know and learned where that name came from.
And it started when I became an interpretive park ranger working up at the House of the
Sun Visitor Center, and next to the House of the Sun Visitor Center there was a hill.
It was called White Hill, a sign "White Hill—Pa Ka Ke‘ahuakaholo oao" or White Hill, Pa
Ka‘oao.
I think it's still there.
Pa Ka‘oao is not white hill, I eventually found out that that hill is called Pu Keakea,
or Pu Keakeo.
Okay, that makes sense.
But why Pa Ka‘oao?
Well, there's a story that goes with that because the area is Pa Ka‘oao and that only
happened in recent Hawaiian history.
Cannot say exactly when, I will say it was a time before King Kekaulike was still a young
man, a sub chief.
He was the chief.
His father was the ruling Aliʻi Nui in Kaupō, Kekumanono (Keahuamanono?), and his village
was Nuʻu.
Kekaulike, his brother was Ka‘oao, Pa Ka‘oao refers to the rock enclosures that was built
on White Hill by Ka‘oao and his retainers.
He was the blood brother to Kekaulike, son of Kekumanono (Keahuamanono?).
Ka‘oao was kind of a renegade and a troublemaker, and even though he had his base there at Puʻu
Keakea, he couldn't grow anything there.
You had to go to the lowlands for your food and things like that.
And he had a group of retainers.
And one day he went down to Nuʻu and his brother's out fishing with his men, and he
came, and he raided the crops, took what he wanted, and of course, he left.
When they came back, Kekaulike wasn't too happy and told his warriors gather the ʻala
stones and wrap it in ti leaf to make it look like food—ʻala stones are the stones for
slings.
And he's going to teach his brother a lesson.
In the meantime, Ka‘oao had sent his men down to---we're going to get back to the Ka‘oao's
after this.
But we have to get through this first.
He sent his men down to Keʻanae on another foraging mission, and he stayed up there with
one or two retainers, I don't know how many, at least one.
And Kekaulike came up from Nuʻu and caught his brother at Pu Keokea.
They knew, they knew what was going to happen and he killed his brother.
And when Ka‘oao fell, he fell into the crater and he fell on the bush called pūkiawe, and
when fell on the pūkiawe, his blood fell on the berries and white, became red.
And that is why today the pūkiawe bush which is around here have red berries.
Now (laughs) what has this got to do with going through Kaʻoaos?
The pūkiawe bush is the most common bush up in the mountain, it grows from the top
of the mountain all the way down to the ocean and the rainforest and the dry land, it's
everywhere.
So when you go into the bushes, the pūkiawe bushes.
You went into the bushes that was known for Ka‘oao, and that name has changed to the
Kawao's.
AK: How interesting.
Kawao's and Ka‘oao.
TR: And yeah it's changed just like Kapalaoa instead of Kapalaʻao, it changes.
And that's how the name of going into the bushes is now called going into the Kawaos.
What happened here at Pu Keokea.
This and this.
And of course, King Kekaulike was.
. . . hang on, he'd be before King Kamehameha's time, yeah, early 1700s?
So, I think the sign is still there.
But now I know what it means.
AK: Do you know any of the heiau in the National Park?
TR: When Queen Liliʻuokalani ended the kapu system, she mandated that the heiaus be removed,
be destroyed, and most of the heiau here at Haleakalā was destroyed.
There was one up at Haleakalā, there was two up here at Kalapawili, but there was one
here near Haleakalā Peak.
And interestingly enough, that heiau is still in existence.
It's a sacrificial heiau.
It was built by Ka‘oao; he built it for his father that's how the heiau came about.
And that's the only heiau that's still in existence.
I've read archeological - I read every archeological thing I could find, but I wouldn't refer that
to being a—these are not Hawaiian archaeologists—as a harvesting heiau related to farming.
AK: Is Kanikauila within park lands?
TR: No, Kanikauila is just outside park land.
Yeah.
It's right about here.
AK: So, only one remaining heiau within park area that we know about?
TR: Well, that depends how you want to describe a heiau.
Heiau is a place of worship.
But the places of prayer came in different forms, rocks, shapes, places.
That's a pretty large one.
You know, it's the largest one in the crater of course, and small compared to many, but
if you go up there it's quite large.
There are small—smaller—structures that I would call heiau.
There is a very unique one in Haleakalā Crater.
Dr. Emory described it and didn't know what it was at the time, and kind of easy to get
to but I don't want to tell where it is.
Well, it's not that easy to get to, but I didn't know what it was, but when I first
saw it, I said, “Wow, this is really interesting.”
It was built in a very particular way.
And my understanding was like two of them in this location, there's one left, but there's
two of them in this very particular shape and the only other other ones found in Hawaiʻi,
I believe, was on Necker Island.
And nobody could say what it was used for, what it was.
But it was obviously an altar of some kind.
When Dr. Emory went to Tahiti, he saw an identical heiau in Tahiti and the people there knew
what it was.
And these heiaus were built by generation of Hawaiian people who were feather pickers;
feather pickers from the birds.
They were bird heiaus.
And it was passed from one generation to the next generation and stayed within that family
in Tahiti.
Was they related?
Same structure, was they related?
AK: What are some of the Hawaiian birds that are found in the crater?
TR: Well the common ones that can be easily seen were the honeycreepers is the ʻiʻiwi,
the ʻapapane, and the ʻamakihi.
Other birds that have been seen are the ʻākohekohe—the crested honeycreeper—the poʻouli—the
Maui parrot bill [the poʻouli refers to the black-faced honeycreeper; kiwikiu is the Maui
parrot bill].
Another one is the Maui honeycreeper.
That was fairly common, too.
You must know the name, I can't remember, but it's a bird that you can see outside here.
Yeah.
So, the birds like ʻiʻiwi and the ʻapapane with their red feathers would have been prized
for harvesting, and where the two bird heiaus were built was next to the forest of māmane.
And if you went there in the time when the māmane was flowering—the whole tree becomes
yellow with flowers.
It would be filled with ʻapapane and ʻiʻiwi.
And made an ideal location to catch birds.
Yeah.
And of course, Hawaiians caught the birds, and pulled what feathers they needed, and
left enough back so they would fly, and then release them.
Those are the birds that you could see today.
The other one that's fairly common is the pueo, that would be there.
You will see the nēnē in Haleakalā Crater.
They were brought there by the state of Hawaiʻi, when Hawai'i became a state in 1959.
Prior to that, there were no nēnē in the crater.
There were many other birds that existed.
They're extinct today.
And one of them that existed in there that ran around and didn't fly was an ibis.
And they found bones in a cave in Kīpahulu Valley, and I came across one cave of about
ten skeletal remains in the crater of ibises.
So they existed in the crater, too, but no more.
Other native birds that it's really important would be the ʻuʻau which you never see and
these birds would come up at night and they came up here to have their young.
AK: Hawaiian petrel?
TR: The dark-rumped petrel.
You know, I'd like to share a little bit more about that.
I'm not a scientist, I'm a resource manager, but I'm not a scientist.
But everybody has the ability to observe and see things over time and come to conclusions.
So, because my job was feral animal control, fence maintenance, as well as I did plant
control, too, and small mammal—mongoose, cat removal, I was able to spend a lot of
time off-trail to do my work and really got to know the crater and very intimately everywhere,
cliffs, flatlands, you name it.
And this is one of the things that I noticed.
Now, Jits Kunioki was one of the first people that introduced me to the ʻuʻau and he studied,
he was one of the first to study the ʻuaʻu; however, he was the first to know that the
ʻuʻau was here.
ʻUʻau was here, it's in Hawaiian stories, Haleakalā Peak is a good one because they
used to go up there to catch ʻuʻau, the Hawaiian people, they used net.
They would build their own nets out of natural fibers and string it up at night and wait
on both ends of the nets and the ʻuʻau would come and get caught in the net, and that's
how they'd catch ʻuʻau, the adult birds.
You could also get them and other birds, but anyway.
AK: What did they catch them for?
TR: To eat, for cook.
I don't remember the exact year but the but one night at Kapalaʻau, the people who was
staying there was hearing this really unusual call, and this was the ʻuʻau singing at
night doing their off-pitch dog barks.
And from there, it led to the discovery of—the finding of—ʻuʻau nesting in the area above
the cliffs of the cabin.
And more research and looking around started to happen and they begin to find that ʻuʻau
was also nesting along the slopes below Kilohana, Kalahaku, and sometimes Leleiwi.
But very small population and really very little was known about the birds.
Oh, gosh, it's amazing in our time, they knew so little.
But here's one of the things that I learned.
When the park was fenced off and the goats came under control, guess what?
The ʻuʻau started to expand their range, started to expand their range and growing
population.
I don't have any studies of that.
I can only tell you by my own knowledge of seeing.
I started to find, like you didn't have to see the birds to know they were there.
You can see the bird.
Sometimes you find dead ones, but you'd see the birds from their tracks, from their droppings,
and especially from the burrows that they dug to have their young.
And guess where they were now starting to have their young?
The floor of the crater, right in the cinders.
They would go to a bunch grass or pūkiawe bush or kūpaoa bush and they would dig a
hole and make a nest.
Never saw that before.
Why?
Because the goats stepped on them, as simple as that—people, horses, cattle, goats.
When the goats were taken out from these areas, that's where you start to see nesting petrels
on places they never nested before.
It seems like they only nested in natural rocky caves, rocky, you know, groups.
No, they dug holes, they made their own nest.
And pretty soon you started---on the cinder slope of Kilohana and Kalahaku they were out
there on the slopes underneath the bunch grasses.
And within my short time of working here where you only heard petrels at Kapalaoa and Hōlua,
you begin to hear petrels in Hanakauhi, you begin to hear petrels in Kaupō, you begin
to hear petrels at Palikū at night.
Everywhere, everywhere, it's amazing.
Goats, goats stepping on them, as simple as that and killing the vegetation.
And of course, there was predator control that probably helped.
Cats were notorious for killing babies, baby petrels and the park did a lot of effort to
get rid of the feral cats.
Dogs were horrible, but dogs could be contained because of the fences, but we did have feral
dogs.
And that was one bird.
Another seabird is the koaʻe, the koaʻe, the white tropic bird, it comes and nests
up in the crater and it's fun to watch that.
They like the cliffs at Palikū and Kaupō where they nest on the cliff faces and all
the cliff places in the crater, they're there.
You see them.
AK: Are there any Hawaiian cultural practices that you're aware of are older, more traditional
Hawaiian cultural practices that occurred within the crater itself?
TR: More recently, there are more people, more Native Hawaiians and non-native Hawaiians
with respect to the Hawaiian culture, do come up here for spiritual guidance and even for
us, you know, refreshing ourselves in the spirit world.
But they do.
Yeah, sensitive issue, there's a tremendous amount of activity that occurred in the past
with the Hawaiians coming up to Haleakalā Crater for burials or worship, and one that
I know that's not often talked about, but the study of the stars.
Most people don't know that one.
There is places in the crater where that was done.
In many places on Maui and all the other islands the Hawaiians studied astronomy for many different
reasons, navigation and others.
Well, the cultural purposes.
There was one man—I never met him, I don't know him—pure Hawaiian ancestry, who was
born in the Koali-Kīpahulu area, who is a very dear friend of a friend mine, so, this
is hearsay.
And he told me, but you see, I already knew, I didn't know the man but I already knew what
he was going to share, and he told me, he told me the name of this person and the person
told him, “When you go to Haleakalā Crater, go to this place and see this place.
This is where I went to do my pule—a small heiau—before I studied, before I was taught,
and I thought, the stars, astronomy.”
There is a place in the crater call Kalupe.
This is where it all happened.
And Kalupe is where the night begins.
But I knew about that spot.
I knew, but nobody told me about it.
I just read it, by reading and studying, nobody was alive to tell me that I could.
That heiau, that small little altar is also a burial.
There is a woman buried in there.
And there are still people today that know who that woman is, just I cannot say, but
she was—she would be—a kahuna in her own right, and she never had children.
But family is still here and living.
I don't think they really know where that is.
They told me about it but they don't know where it is, and there's nobody there to show
them anymore.
AK: Are there any places in particular that you're comfortable sharing that you feel especially
connected too?
TR: That's everywhere.
[Readjust microphone]
TR: Yeah, there's lots of junk memories, but there's lots of good ones and lots of places
I really enjoy.
I tell you about a misadventure, ya, I'll tell you about this one kind of like a misadventure.
Backcountry ranger, I'm assigned horses and one of the horses I had was kind of a problem
only because we didn't fully understand the problem.
But she had an extremely sensitive mouth and her whole head, she was really sensitive with
her head, so you had to be really careful with her and she gave a lot of people a lot
of problems.
And I didn't know.
It took me a while to really learn that one.
And so she became a pack animal and she was part of my pack.
Nice horse, strong horse.
Her name was Koa.
And I said, you know, “What a waste, we need a good horse to ride.”
So, I used her for pack for quite a while, and I learned her.
And then I learned that one thing you cannot put a bit in her mouth, she just freaks out.
So, I use what is called a hackamore, which has no bit in the mouth, and I began riding
her, a very strong powerful animal.
Gosh, the first time I got on her and I rode, I went Palikū, went up Sliding Sands, I went
on patrol.
I rode from Palikū, up Sliding Sands trail, almost to the top, turn around, went back
down, went across horse trails everywhere, up to Laʻea, up to Holinalina, down Holinalina,
down to Kaupō, and then back to Palikū.
All day, we probably did about twenty-five miles.
So, one day I decided that I'm going to take her hunting.
She's really afraid of goats and pigs but manageable.
I decided that I was going to go, and I've done this many times before, that I'm going
to go to the back side of Hāna Mountain, Hanakauhi to looks for goats and pigs, part
of my job.
And I took her up there in the evening and I would go there in the full moon.
And I would go in the evening time, not so much in the morning because we do work down
below, and get most of work done that I needed to, and I would take the late afternoon off
and try to get something.
So, I got up to a place called Frisbee Meadow—not Frisbee Meadow, but above that—and tied
her up to a rock and went up, and we were in the outside of the crater, you can see
the crater.
So, I went up to the rim of the crater to see any goats.
And I was doing that, and some goats came by.
Not by me, by Koa.
Oh, she did not like that.
And off she went.
Somehow got loose.
Off she went, gone.
Great, there goes my horse, my cartridge is in there.
I got my gun, my chaps on, my spurs on, and that's all I had.
There goes my horse, oh well, she's going back to Palikū, that's what they all do,
going back with the other horses.
Okay, so, I'm going to walk back.
So, I'm walking back and here she comes back.
She met more goats (laughs) and turned around and here I am, “Whoa Koa, whoa Koa,” and
dragging her lead.
“Whoa Koa.”
Looks at me and keeps running (laughs).
Oh, man.
Now, she's heading to the top of the mountain, Hanakauhi Peak, and God knows where she's
going.
She's never been up there before in her life.
I've been.
She's never been.
And she's going the rocks going, oh, boy, I couldn't tell my boss I lost my horse (laughs).
Oh, no.
And so just before the peak, the rope got caught in a crack in a rock, so she couldn't
go anymore.
So, here I was on the top of the mountain with my horse.
Got the horse back.
Good, I was happy.
Can't blame her.
You know, I'm not going to discipline her.
It really wasn't her fault.
And the sun is going down.
So I just let her lead the way and I knew the trail down, she didn't walk on the trail,
but I knew the whole horse trail that runs on that ridge.
So, I wasn't worried about anything.
The moon was coming up.
Well, I am going to watch the sunset.
Beautiful day.
I could see all of Hāna, Keʻanae, Wailuku, Kahakaloa, everywhere.
It was very clear.
Watch the sunset, really nice in its full until it got dark.
Waited a little while, I turned around and watched the moon rise.
And I stayed there, the moon came up, I could see.
I got on my horse, and I rode back to Palikū.
But it was really, really nice.
AK: Sounds beautiful.
TR: Didn't get any goats or any pigs, had a good experience.
AK: Have you been on some of the old trails or do you know of any?
TR: I've been on many trails.
The trails, there were many trails in existence in the crater, pre-national park.
Of course, the Hawaiians had their own system of trails, and one really important one was
(Kahipilani?)
Kahipili—Kikahipilani's—trail, anyway, but it went through the middle of the crater
and actually was a trail that you could still see parts of it and it's eroded, near Bottomless
Pit area.
And that trail came from this side of Maui, Kula side, through the crater, there were
many connecting trails, but through the crater and went down to Hāna.
There's stories about that, interesting stories.
For instance, I told you about---here we go diverting.
Waiʻānapanapa, which is one of the ponds as you go down, the first pond in the rainforest,
as you go down the bottom part of Kalapawili Ridge.
But below that is another lake, and true lake by definition, because it maintains a termocline
and does have a source of water and an outlet, not all the time but most of the time.
Kapiʻilani is credited with it—it is said that he dammed that—and made that lake.
That lake was called Waiʻeleʻele.
AK: Black water.
TR: Black bay.
Yeah, that's it, and so while I'm there it's Waiʻānapanapa, there's Waiʻeleʻele, and
inside Kīpahulu Valley there's another one called Wainēnē, which most people don't
know.
AK: What is Waiʻānapanapa?
TR: I don't know.
I don't, I can't tell you, Waiʻānapanapa, you gotta look it up.
Where's Nan?
(Laughs) She knows, she knows her Hawaiian really well.
So, yeah anyway, the early, mid early 1930s is when the national park established a system
of trails in there, but there were already trails there were already horse trails, people
trails, but they set a system of trails, which is the trails that we're required to be on
today, and simply to not destroy the natural environment.
So of that thirty or less miles of trails—interconnecting trails—I can tell you, you know, honestly,
besides that, there's thirty-plus miles more trails in the crater that are horse trails.
Back before this became a park, this was ranch land.
Haleakalā Ranch was primarily the ranch, but their lands went all the way up to Hāna
mountain.
They would raise cattle on the back side of Hāna Mountain every summer.
And they took the cattle to the crater to graze up there.
They established the trails.
The most popular one is the trail called Laulu, which starts by Palikū Cabin, and I'm saying
horse trails, and there was one that actually was considered to be made into a park trail
but it just took too many people through sensitive areas that they really shouldn't be---just
to protect the areas.
Laulu, I could never figure that out.
What does that mean?
AK: Laulu or Lauulu?
TR: La-ulu.
La.
AK: Day or sun?
TR: I know it's a place.
The trail, Laulu, is the trail to Laulu.
Laulu is here, this is the area of Laulu, it is the trail that went to Laulu.
AK: Too high for ʻulu, for ʻulu plant.
TR: Not ʻulu, but I don't know really what the name is.
But anyway, so over time just by my walking around, I would find trails.
There is no record or knowledge—no one that I know of—that know of the trail that went
into Kīpahulu Valley, there was a horse trail that went into Kīpahulu Valley because I
walked it and I know horses trail and I know there was a horse trail in set stone.
It's still there.
Most of it is washed away, you can't go through it anymore.
There's trails, gosh.
. . . Kaupō Gap.
A good trail to explain and put this all into perspective.
A major, major trail and part of it is at Haleakalā Crater—went through Haleakalā
Crater—but that trail went completely around East Maui, Alanui.
I know some cowboys that rode a lot of it.
I've rode some of it, and I was able to Google Earth and follow the trail from where we are
right now, going back to ʻUlupalakua, across Kahikinui, pass Nuʻu, into Kaupō Gap, up
into the crater, and back here, the trail is still there.
AK: Wow, it's a loop trail?
TR: It's a high mountain trail for people to travel and it started as a Hawaiian trail
and became a horse trail, and it's in Nakula in the parkland.
And I walked it.
And I know cowboys who used to ride it like that today, but they used to ride it.
And this is switchbacks like Halemauʻu trail, switchback trails, switch back down into these
monster gulches and back up again.
Pretty amazing, but it went right through the crater.
When I was working back there, I was fortunate in getting to meet a lot of people and I met
many old timers like Mr. Duvachel, and my philosophy was keep your mouth shut and listen
(laughs).
Listen, they have something to teach you.
And I was very interested in knowing their stories.
And they would tell me trails that I have yet to find.
They would tell me of caves that were used as shelters that I have yet to find, it's
on my iPhone.
But they use, they used as cowboys working the cattle in the crater, and they used it
as hunters.
And one of them that I have never found, and it's hard to believe that there is, but it's
got to exist because there are other trails like the one I told you about that goes around
on this side of Maui, the west side of Maui through the rough, rugged gulches.
I told myself nobody is going to build trails in those places, its horrendous—flash floods—but
there is one.
About this level, straight across, he told there's a horse trail that goes through Halemauʻu,
through Waikau and across and up Hāna mountain.
I tried to find it, but I cannot find it.
There are trails that actually go through the forests of Hāna Mountain, this green
line that shows, is a forest elevation limit and then becomes like a grassland, and there's
a horse trail that follows that.
I've rode some of it with oldtimers, and I found some of it by walking, I found mostly
just by walking, never ride it.
Halemauʻu trail that we currently use today, there was another trail before that, it was
part of the Hawaiian trail that went down that got washed out too many times, that's
why they built the trail down here.
But there was another switchback trail down here in the Haleakalā ranch lands.
But below Halemauʻu, in a place called ʻĀinahou, is where they raised cattle, and they brought
cattle down that way to that location.
AK: Do you know much about the area that we're in right now?
Hosmer Grove and if there's a traditional name for this area?
TR: No, I don't know.
I don't know what the traditional name would be, I really wouldn't, I'm sure there was
one.
And I'm sure there had to be one because there's an important shelter area right here that—a
natural one—that they used.
Right over there, nobody knows, over there, it's part of a lava tube.
But it was a place that they stayed overnight.
And nearby is the old trail, the one that I was telling you about that went around the
island, it comes up thorough there, and comes across here, and part of it is part of the
current supply trail, part of it is not.
But no, I don't know.
I don't know, you know, Ralph Hosmer, is the one of course that started the reforestation
here, first territorial forester.
It's unfortunate that they didn't understand that native trees would have been better,
and if they wanted a timber industry, they should have planted koa.
You could be harvesting today.
Yeah.
Special, special moments.
I'll tell you this one.
I became a back country ranger in 1979.
Six months into my position, my job was to check campground and camping permits, six
months into my position, a full campground, full of people, Capital School full of people
with people, campground twenty-five people.
I went, and I go check camping permits, but it's my time to be available to the public,
to talk to them and answer their questions and concerns and share information, whatever
it is.
And so I went to every campsite, talk to everybody.
And that was the main reason why I went there, sure to check the permits.
And I met Claire Krager.
1983 we got married at Palikū.
Yeah, it was a special moment and a special time.
She has since passed away, Claire Krager Barbein.
That was special, that in itself was a fun event.
AK: Yeah?
TR: I stayed within the limits of the parks, out camping, which is the largest group is
fifteen for camping.
I had the Ranger cabin, twelve people, and I had the visitor cabin, twelve people.
So that's all we could invite.
Everybody came and everyone else, I thought oh well, they can make the arrangements.
My cousin was working on the fence crew down here and he hiked up and joined us.
AK: Oh wow.
How was the weather?
TR: We had great weather.
So, we went in for several nights and that was the first time my dad came in since 1938.
And I did get permission from the superintendent to fly him in.
He couldn't walk, and he couldn't ride a horse.
And one of the first things he said when he got into the cabin, because we landed him
in the pasture, away from the visitor cabin.
He went to the patrol cabin, looked out through the kitchen and said, “Well, where's the
visitor cabin?
There's too much trees.”
(Laughs) This is kind of nice to hear.
Yeah, yeah.
He had a few stories about the crater.
That was a special moment.
AK: And your dad and your grandfather both worked.
. .
TR: My grandfather didn't work, my great-grandfather helped to work on the road.
He lived in Kula, where Kula Hardware Store is located.
And he walked to work every day and walked home.
However the days were, he walked home every day.
And that's what they did.
And, you know, they used horses and mules to do most of the work, cutting rock and cutting
stone.
My grandfather had no stories—both my grandfathers—had no stories of Haleakalā.
My dad has a few.
(Chuckles) He tried to go in with some of his friends in the CCC, tried to go down Bottomless
Pit but the luna caught them, oh, they got scolded, they never did.
But anyway, he would describe a typical work week for them.
AK: Is this with the CCC?
TR: CCC, but they were older and other skilled men, there were no women.
He was sixteen years old.
I think he lied about his age, sixteen years old, and they were building Palikū patrol
cabin.
And one of the jobs would be to give, you know, even though they had horses and mules,
they were packing hardware.
They were packing screws and nails and things like that that they could carry.
And that was their job, is to hike into Palikū, drop it off, and the next day hike out.
Then they hike back in again.
What they would do was they would hike in and hike out the same day and the next day
was a free day (laughs).
They could play.
Yeah, he told me once one of their play days in the crater, they were exploring around
and he hiked up to the mountain Haleakalā nearby and they started going down one of
the ridges and back then they had dogs, they could bring dogs.
The clouds came in and they got stuck.
They had no gear and they froze that night, a couple of the young men, and said they huddled
around the dogs real good to keep warm and spent the night on the ridges up there.
AK: Is that Cable Ridge?
TR: No, Cable Ridge is down there.
AK: Oh, Cable Ridge is down here.
TR: Yeah, this below Haleakalā Peak and the area would be called Kaʻea.
They spent a night there.
He didn't have too many other stories.
There's some other ones, I'm not going to share.
But they had at Hōlua cabin, they had their first introduction into the crater by going
out and catching snipes.
They had to go out nighttime.
They were told they had to go out and catch snipes.
They had to go take sticks and burlap bags and beat the bushes and catchs snipes.
Of course, nobody caught anything.
(Laughs)
AK: Yeah, I remember Rose (Freitas) mentioning that.
TR: (Laughs).
That was a traditional thing.
AK: Are there any other memories or stories that you like to share, other place names?
TR: Yeah, when I walked around in the course of my work and today they have people walk
in pairs now for safety, but back then you didn't.
But I would also keep my eyes open for any place that might serve as a shelter in case
I sprained my ankle and I can't make it back, someplace I could go and spend the night and
continue my journey.
I would keep my eyes open for things.
I wasn't one to go exploring to go find things, but I would look for places where I could
get away from the wind and weather.
I've come across many interesting areas.
So, caves was used—lava tubes, caves—was used quite a bit by the early Hawaiian people,
and those that come later for shelters.
It was really important, there was nothing else, and no tents really, you know, tents
came much, much later and they were canvas.
So, shelters was extremely important, and the most common one is Bubble Cave, Alama
Kauhi or Smoky Cave located in center of the crater.
And that's one cave that people are welcome to go in, right up the trail, and you're welcome
to go and see, but it's not marked.
But there are many others.
Many others.
One of the caves that that's always interested me, it was one that's called Elilau.
I've seen it on an old map, I've read it in some reports.
I know of no one that knows of that cave, shelter cave.
I met people—Native Hawaiians—who know of the cave, we've talked about the story
about the cave as a shelter.
They've never been there.
They don't know where it is, but they know of the cave, you know, the place, important
cave, like Bubble Cave very important.
It's a good shelter site.
And Elilau, I found it, by accident.
And it was only because I was flying in a helicopter and I was looking for goats that
had come into the park.
So I know where it is.
I had never been to it, but I'm the only one that knows where it is now.
The pilot that was with me had passed away, so nobody else.
But places like that would be good for the park to keep within its files, the cultural
places and cultural events.
And I know like those friends of mine in Kaupō, they would like to go because their ancestors
went there.
They want to see it, they want to feel it.
Well, one of the other common caves, its name has changed its name many times, one that
you've heard about called Panini Cave and that's Laʻea Cave.
It was a nice small cave, but you can get out of the weather and that was good.
But near that cave was another cave that was called Hunter's Cave because hunters liked
going in there.
Today, people call it Crystal Cave.
You know, these wrong names.
But Crystal Cave. the Hawaiian name for that cave is Olinalina, which refers to the calcified
crystals that's in that cave.
That cave—well, I've been there many times—but it changed.
I saw an old photograph—I don't know where this photograph came from—but I saw an old
photograph of five cowboys on their horses in the cave.
But the key was a big overhang—and there is a cave in there—it had a huge overhang,
it's in a vent, a huge overhang.
And they could actually be under it with the horses in the cave.
And it was it was an ideal place, was not too far from there was another vent that was
solid splatter lava around it had one entrance and they would use old māmane tree log to
block the entrance and that's where they would keep their horses.
It wasn't far from where they were spending the night, but it became a very important
cave, Olinalina Cave.
That is near another significant cave that is not in the park's file.
Many stories of Maui, Maui snaring the sun.
Where?
Where did he snare the sun?
Somebody painted a picture of Maui at the top of the summit at Haleakalā, not the peak,
but the summit snaring the sun.
Is that where he did it?
Most people have read that story, the story of Maui snaring the sun and not going to the
story itself, but he would snare the legs of the sun, the rays, and tie it to a pandanus
tree, a lauhala tree, which meant he had to be in the lowlands, because lauhala doesn't
grow up high in the mountains.
He had to be in the lowlands to tie it to a tree like that, and stories like that and
other stories about snaring in the sun.
Some tell you kind where, but some don’t.
But there's one story that says that he hid in a cave and waited for the sun to come and
walk across the crater to snare.
That cave was in Haleakalā Crater.
I came across that cave a long time ago.
I never went back to it.
There were reasons why I didn't go back to it, personal reasons.
And I was reading the legend, and they described features that was where the cave was.
Because those features exist no place else.
The cave that Maui snared the sun, I believe, is in Haleakalā Crater, and hopefully it
can be recorded somewhere as a location, but we don't want people going there.
And within the last few years, I've actually met people in the crater looking for that
place.
I won't tell them, cannot.
You got to keep these places sacred, but it should be passed on.
Special place.
There's other places I wonder about.
I could never figure it out.
The cave by the lone standing koa.
There's a Hawaiian name for it, the lone standing koa, I can't remember what it was.
It was used by hunters a lot, a really nice cave, perfect for two people, nice well-sheltered.
When I came across it, I didn't know where it was, by accident I came across it.
But just by the name of the story it fits.
Still had porcelain pots in there.
And since then the front of the cave have crashed in, you can peek inside, but you can't
go in anymore.
Everything that's in there is there forever.
But what's interesting about that and special, very close to that place is what I would call
a natural altar.
And it's natural it wasn't man-made.
It was a very, very large pōhaku, a large rock and on top of it had a kōlea tree growing,
roots, and there were offerings on that rock.
It stood about five feet tall and would be like about four foot square, four to five
foot square, round.
But there would be ʻopihi shells which is common.
There would be cowry shells which is common.
Anybody can put that, but these are all food sources, ʻopihi is pretty easy to come by;
cowry shells, a little harder but anybody could get them.
There were pūpū shells, the snail, the snail that ate the ʻopihi, which we eat, was there.
You know, anybody could put those things there and those things that last for a long time,
they're all covered with leaves.
But there was another shell in there that nobody really knows.
And the only place I saw it was in between Kaupō and Kīpahulu.
It was the Hawaiian oyster.
It was an oyster shell.
And I looked at it, whoa, somebody had to really know what that is to bring that food
shell here as an offering.
And nobody knows the story.
I asked some of the folks in Kaupō or that live in the area, but nobody really knew about
it.
But still there, a special place.
There was some reason why that was there.
I don't know.
Why that one rock stood out in the offerings that were made there, but that oyster shell—a
native oyster—you don't find it, you don't see it.
You really got to know what you're looking for and I've seen it, I've seen it because,
oh, what is that?
You know, but anyway.
So, that's a special spot where the cave of the lone standing koa.
Below that is another sheltered cave, it has a name but that cave was important.
It was within a stream bed, you know, solid basaltic rock where when it rained, the depression
held water, and it was an important source of water for the horses, for people, and for
the cattle.
And there would always be a place, a destination, when they were driving cattle to take the
cattle to water, when they brought cattle from Kaupō up into the crater to spend the
night before going up to Sliding Sands trail on to ʻUlupalakua.
How we doing on time?
AK: Oh, yeah.
How are we doing on time?
Micah Mizukami: If you have more to share.
. .
TR: Endless.
I do want to say something similar to what Nan was talking about.
The National Park Service is a really, I think it's a pretty unique organization, that I
came to learn because, yeah, it's a government job, but to get up into echelons of pay that
you can live on, it's really difficult.
And paywise, you can get better pay elsewhere.
So, you have to have a sense of dedication to really work for the National Park Service,
for the Forest Service or the Department of Interior.
And they have a system of hiring and a system to encourage movement.
And this is how you usually promote yourself and level by going from one park to the next
park, it has great benefit in that it brings new people, new ideas.
But one of the things that it fails to do, is to recognize institutional knowledge.
When you keep changing people every three years, every five years, every year, you lose
history, you lose knowledge, you lose part of the culture.
The culture of that is not necessarily Haleakalā any place, and granted, Haleakalā became
a national park because of its scenic grandeur and then later, geologic beauty.
But equally, which is learned later, the natural beauty, the plants, the animals, the quiet,
which today is hard to find these things.
But Haleakalā National Park, whether it's Kīpahulu or in the Summit District or crater
or Kīpahulu, is a cultural park as important as the scenic value.
The people who made this park or culture extremely important.
That culture is alive today.
It's living; culture dies when you die.
It's passed on to living people and as living people change, culture changes, so the culture
of old gone, the culture of today, different and growing, evolving like all cultures.
Institutional knowledge and culture come hand-in-hand.
Institutional knowledge, it's important to know where the valves to shut off the water
here at Hosmer's Grove if you have a leak.
That's institutional knowledge.
But institutional knowledge in terms of what this place was, what is the name of this place
has been lost, is equally important.
Managers, I feel, would do justice to the people that hold culture to the place by encouraging
employees that stay to carry the knowledge of how the park runs, and the culture that
they can bring with them, because they are Hawaiian.
And you may not have the genes to be Hawaiian.
Yeah, genes is important, but culture is not genes.
Culture is something that is developed by people over time.
And they need that here.
This is an important cultural park, there's so much to offer and there's so much to still
offer the living descendants of this land here.
That's what I'd like to see.
AK: Can you maybe talk about a few of the people or key personnel that you worked with
when you started.
I know we've interviewed a few of them.
TR: Yeah, yeah.
AK: And maybe any mentors you've had at the park as well.
TR: Yeah.
There's so much to share.
I mentioned Jitsumi Kunioki.
I started in interpretation.
And so the people that worked there were all the people that I followed, learned from.
Jit Kunioki was one of them, he's no longer here.
Carol Beadle was another one.
She's no longer here.
Adele Favela, God bless her, she's no longer here, story is, if you wanted to know anything
about Haleakalā, you'd talk to Adele (laughs).
Adele knows.
But anyway, those were key figures when I first started.
Hugo Huntsinger was the superintendent at the time and he himself, he saw the value
in what he was talking about, the culture, but he really, really did a great deal for
this park in getting it protected and getting it developed from what was a three division
park to what it is today.
You know, it happened in his time maintenance division, administration division and everybody
else, it really happened in his time.
He helped to bring the fences here, which is money.
You need money to do that.
You need people with knowledge.
Chief of Maintenance, Clifford McCall, he ran the maintenance division.
He had tremendous knowledge of the crater.
He never would ride a horse.
I walk, you take the horse with my stuff.
But when I knew him, his days at the crater was done but he had great knowledge, he had
many years of here and great knowledge of the mountain and operating of this park and
the maintenance.
Superintendents that came later, Don Reeser, Chief Rangers, Barry Cooper.
When I started, Dave Duncheck was Chief Ranger and he was quite helpful and my supervisor.
So many, there's so many names, so many people that worked here, some still working here.
Yeah.
Ron Nagata, no question about that.
I think he was a very dynamic, very powerful person protecting this mountain.
Steve Andersen, he used to work here, Timmy Bailey, his wife, Cathleen, Joy Tamayose,
her coworkers, Bill Haus, Patti Welton.
You know, we could spend a whole day here just naming names but yeah.
I want to mention one person.
He was a janitor.
He had so much to offer this park outside of cleaning toilets, he was of pure Hawaiian
ancestry.
He was born in Kaupō.
When he was born, his piko, his umbilical cord, was taken up here and placed in Bottomless
Pit.
He held the history of this mountain with his life.
He was my neighbor.
That's one of the reasons why I learned about the park, was from him.
His name was Bernard Gibson.
He worked here for sixteen years as a seasonal maintenance ranger.
And he lost his vision.
He was elderly at that time in his sixties, and he couldn't do his work anymore.
And the sad part is the park never tapped into that knowledge—what we're doing right
now.
You know, he told me about the cattle drive through the crater, how they would come up
Kaupō Gap, a cowboy, a line of cattle, a cowboy, another line of cattle, a cowboy,
another line of cattle up the trail, single file all the way from Kaupō up sliding sands
trail—different sliding sands trail from today.
There was another one.
People don't know about that one, a different one, totally different one.
Down Skyline Drive, Polipoli, to Makena Bay to load cattle on the ship.
He did that, as a young boy, he did that.
He told me things that I found to go there and see, for me, for my knowledge to keep.
Okay, that's fine, but yeah, I have to mention his name, Bernard.
Always friendly with the people and tourists and, you know.
So it doesn't matter what the job is, when you want to, you keep your movement of people
to keep the ideas coming, to keep the new knowledge and new energy.
But you need to also keep people that know the place.
Doesn't matter what job it is, you bring the culture here with people.
Yeah so, he was.
. . . Jhon Kjargard, local boy, he is in New Zealand now, his job is in resources management.
He got me into enough trouble, that's all I'll say (laughs).
But he was an expert marksman.
And his job was to hunt goats and pigs.
That was part of his job, but he did many things in helping to start the work that Ron
followed.
Human resources management and trying to get money and trying to get fences started.
I could name hundreds of people that volunteered with me, hundreds upon hundreds of people
that did volunteer work for the park because they loved the place.
For free, doing all kinds of things, you name it, having to pull weeds, paint roofs, build
photovoltaic systems for the cabins, plumbing, fix trails, search and rescue, feral animal
control, fence building, writing reports, managing data.
Oh, just goes on and on and on with a lot of volunteers that have worked up here and
done things.
So, so, so many.
I was fortunate because I was a backcountry ranger, I met lots of people that really loved
the mountain because they took them ten miles just to get there, to tell me that.
They had to love the mountain.
And many came wanting to do something for the park.
Donations.
“How can I help?”
“Well, you're going back to Florida.
You can make a donation if you want.
It’ll go back up to Haleakalā.
It'll be used for interpretive work or something.
There's something you can do.
You can’t physically do anything.”
Yeah, a lot of people.
AK: Could you talk about some of your---I know you mentioned gathering practices and
how you gathered ʻōhelo berries, were their plants or other things that you used up here?
TR: Yeah, lei making, haku leis, the kind you like to wear on your hat especially, you
can do other kinds was a very common practice in Paniolo times, which is still current today.
But it was even more prevalent then.
When the Cowboys went up the mountain sometimes they made their leis before they even left
and wore it on the hats all day.
But if they didn't do it, excuse me, they would take something from the mountain native
plants and they would make a lei, a haku lei.
Well, a haku lei would be just one item of using some of the natural resources that's
here in the park and because it's culture related, the park had an avenue where you
could make a lei for yourself.
But making the lei for yourself is not just making the lei, yes, you have to know how
to do it but you have to understand that picking up of the liko, the harvesting of what you
need.
And you only would pick what you need.
And you would spread the pickings so you wouldn't have a big impact.
You would take a little here and a little there and elsewhere.
You couldn't even tell that it was even harvested, the liko, or the lei you were making.
And of course, you wouldn't take anything that was rare or endangered.
You have to be knowledgeable of that today.
And there are endangered species on the trail.
There are very rare species right on the trail in the park.
So, we did that and we did that because it was fun.
We did that because it was a cultural practice.
We did that because it helped us to share the gathering, help us to be the family, to
go out and do it, to come together at night—whenever it would be—and sit and make for someone
special for yourself.
It was just a wonderful thing to do.
AK: Was it mainly ferns or flowers?
TR: Anything you want to, you'd be surprised you can take the dead leaves and make a lei
if you really knew how.
But traditional the kūpaoa was one of the, the ʻaʻaliʻi was one of my favorites, the
seed from the ʻaʻaliʻi, the ʻaʻaliʻi, well for one would last.
It would last a long time.
And the seed would come in a variety of different colors.
So you could really add character to the lei and the pūkiawe, the kāʻaoʻao, the pink
berries, red berries, sometimes white berries, little pieces of it, little branches of the
pokey leaves that stab you would add to the variety.
But these two common plants was used mostly, the pūkiawe and the ʻaʻaliʻi.
You could add other things.
But we wouldn't pick the lehua because the lehua wouldn't last and it was better to see
on the tree, even though it's one of the hula flower plants.
Ferns, I would make some out of the.
. . . There were many different varieties and species of fern within the park.
Not every one was really suitable for making a nice lei.
Palapalai was one that was quite suitable, really nice.
There's not too many places where they exist in the crater, although it's a very common
fern, you know, it's not endangered or rare and we knew where it was.
And so in the process when we went down to the place where the maile grew, the palapalai
grew.
And so we would harvest both.
And maile lei stood on its own as a lei within itself and the palapalai you could make a
lei just only of the fern leaf or you could add it to the ʻaʻa'liʻi or the pūkiawe
or some of the other plants.
ʻŌhelo would work but it didn't last for long, it would be pretty and there were plenty
ʻōhelo.
Well, that's pretty much the most common.
I forgot the name, but the white lichen moss that grows in rocks makes interesting additions
to a haku lei, but normally I don't really touch it unless it's in a place that has plenty
and is not going to be seen because when you take it, you do leave a little scar on the
rock and it takes a long time for that to come back, so, I don't usually use it.
And I certainly don't use it where where people can enjoy it in its natural setting, I forget
the name of that.
Outside of that, lei making was the main thing.
We would eat the shoots of the pohole, and that was quite common in forested part of
the crater, at Palikū.
AK: Okay I think it's back on recording.
TR: Yeah, so another native plant that we enjoy harvesting was and again, this was allowed
by the park in certain specific amounts would be the ʻākala berry, the native raspberry
and indigenous plant.
It had a really short season and can really vary, but when it was going off, it was pie
city (laughs).
So, we would harvest enough to take home and make jelly and enough to at least make one
pie while we was within the crater, and that would be the ʻākala berry.
We also did this with the ʻōhelo and that would be my favorite, collecting ohelo, which
is just would be great putting on pancakes.
But you can eat it by itself but on pancakes is really good and you can make jam out of
that.
That was really good.
That's about it.
There were some medicinals.
Here's a good story, a medicinal one.
I'm at Palikū, Ranger Ted, and the visitor comes, a guy comes up to me, really embarrassed.
So, he tells me “I just got in on a plane and came in the crater and I have not been
able to use the bathroom.
You know what I mean?
You have anything I can use to help me use the bathroom?”
“I don't,” I said, “Well, maybe coffee might help, I've heard maybe vinegar.
I got some of that.
But if you want to try, I know of a native plant that you can use to help you out.”
“Oh?
Okay.”
Well, the plant is called kūkaenēnē.
AK: That's a good name for that kind of plant.
(Laughter)
TR: Kūkaenēnē—and it's beautiful—it's a vine just like a vine and grows on the rocks
and like the size of, I guess, pearls, I would use, much more than a marble, black, shiny
berries and you eat the berries and it's supposed to be an extremely good laxative.
So we go find the berries.
And I tell him, “If you want, I can show you the book where it says that it was used
by the early Hawaiian people for a laxative.”
“No, no, no, we go.”
But it doesn't tell you how much.
You know, I really, I really don't know how much for you to eat.
I'll eat one.
I wanted him to feel comfortable that it wasn't poisonous.
“Okay, I'll eat a couple.”
Next morning, he tell me, “Thank you so much.
It worked.”
(Laughter)
AK: Yeah.
Are there other plants you collected for lāʻau lapaʻau?
TR: Yes, there is.
Actually, that one was very common was the pūkiawe, was used for purification; the smoke
was a cleansing smoke.
It was used for ritual and for purification.
That would be the pūkiawe plant.
AK: To inhale?
TR: Yeah.
And it's a really oily plant, so if you put a match to it, it'll go phew [mimics burning
sound].
There's many.
Another plant it's called ʻūlei.
I'm not sure what ʻūlei means.
I would call it the tripping plant, but boy, you walk through that, you're going to fall.
But it's similar to the kūkaenēnē, it's kind of like a crawling plant that's kind
of like a bush.
It has white blossoms that smells so good, smells really, really good.
It developed into marble sized seeds, berries, white, and this was used as a famine food.
It wasn't for eating, but was used as a famine food when nothing else was available eat ʻūlei.
It is very sweet, very tasty.
AK: You eat the seeds?
TR: No, you don't eat the seed.
You only eat the fruity parts.
And it had a really chalky texture.
But boy, if you hungry, you do that.
There is another plant, it's a plantain.
I don't believe it's native.
I think it's exotic.
It's not endemic and it's a plantain but it grows there and it's good for high blood pressure.
You make a tea out of it.
And I learned about that from an old cowboy that came in.
He was collecting some.
“What you doing?”
I thought it was weeds.
“Oh, this is my medication for high blood pressure.”
There's other medicinal plants within the park as well.
Of course within Kīpahulu, the lower section, within the crater there is others.
I can't quite remember.
I know there are some other ones.
They'll come to me, yeah.
What else?
AK: But.
I think maybe you could kind of wrap up, you know, we were just talking about sort of your
time at the park and kind of the evolution.
. . .
TR: When I began working with volunteers as an employee starting in 1979, when people
come to me and tell me, “Is there something I can do to help?”
And I learned that there's a lot of people out there just really wanting to help.
And so I started recruiting volunteers.
My supervisor Ron Nagata was very positive about that.
The national park liked having volunteers.
And so that developed in many, many different forms.
The removal of the goats from within Haleakalā Crater was primarily done by volunteers.
Most people don't know it.
It is a very sensitive topic because unfortunately to we remove them, we need to kill them.
We tried different ways.
We did try and capture them alive, very difficult, but not efficient and there's no way you can
get them off a cliff.
So volunteers that did that—both men and women—had to have the understanding and
knowledge and skills.
Like the fence maintenance worker, they had to have very similar skills to do that.
And because it was within my position to manage that, but having the knowledge and being a
hunter myself, I had to change my own philosophies.
My philosophies around this was still the same.
I only want to harvest what I can utilize or share and not waste any.
But because of the situation that existed up here, you have to understand that.
But spending so much time in the mountain, I knew where these goats were.
I knew how they moved, I knew how they travelled.
I knew when they came down a certain place at a certain time and when they went back
the entire crater, I spent so much time just doing it.
And some of it I did with non-park employees and learned from them.
So with that knowledge, we organized a goat drive.
We did two every month.
Everybody was chosen; some people was not asked to come back.
And the majority of the 7000-plus goats that we removed from the crater after the fencing,
after the fencing, was done by them.
The remaining---that was my job, that's what I did to the very end.
I considered that to be and this story goes even deeper than that.
About 150-160 goats was left after the volunteers.
Those are the ones that we got, they were the hard ones.
The park service got that.
The last goat, the original goat that was removed from within the park was at Kapalaoa.
An adult nanny and two kids.
They became stew.
And it was animals that I knew that we couldn't get, and we used helicopters.
It was really a smart animal, but one day she made a mistake with her two young and
I was riding up on horseback before Kapalaoa and I saw them and I took the time and I got
them, I did harvest them.
But I didn't know that they were the last ones.
There's no way of knowing until after about three or four years of monitoring and management,
because I could account for every goat that came in after that through the fence.
And that was the last one that was shot in the park.
Mission accomplished.
Mission accomplished for the better of the mountain; the natural resources, the birds,
the plants, the silverswords, the ʻāhinahina.
So, yeah, that was really good.
AK: Are there any future directions you'd like to see for the park?
TR: So my relationship with the park continued after I retired in 2010 as a volunteer and
I had three crew leaders plus myself, about fifty regular participants, and we did a minimum
of once a month volunteer trips until one of my crew groups had one horse accident and
they told us not to come back anymore.
That ended my volunteering.
I would still be volunteering.
AK: I have no more questions, but are there any final thoughts or story?
Is there anything you'd like to share?
TR: Yeah, one last one.
I hope this isn't drawn out too long.
(Laughs).
Everybody have inspirational moments, and you forget about them.
And sometimes they come back to you and you remember.
I had one of those.
One of those inspirational moments, I was seven years old.
I knew nothing about Haleakalā.
Haleakalā was so far away, it was like going to the mainland back then.
I went to Oʻahu, never went anywhere.
I was in second grade and the classroom had an—one side of the classroom was open to
the mountain, and I wasn't paying attention to Mrs. Robinson, the teacher.
I was looking at the mountain.
All I could see was Hanakauhi mountain and Koʻolau Gap and parts of the summit.
I was looking up there, daydreaming and I told myself, “I want to know that mountain.”
There wasn't any possibility, seven years old.
Many, many years later, many, many years later, I forgot about that long time ago.
I ride up on Kimo, my horse, my park horse, doing feral animal control and we’re going
for pigs.
The best way to find pigs is not to go for them, but wait for them.
So we ride up the mountain, on Lauʻulu trail, ride across Kalapawili Ridge to Aloha park.
We go on one of the side trails that I knew, to a lone māmane tree that was still surviving
that I could tie my horse to tree and walk up on the hillside and watch for pigs.
It was beautiful, beautiful day.
And we're sitting there and darn it if Ted didn't see Ted in the second grade down at
Hāʻiku school.
Holy smoke, I remember that.
I know this mountain pretty well now (laughs).
Yeah, that was an interesting moment.
But then much later, you know, they don't teach you about the Hawaiiana in schools back
then or of native plants and it was all about squirrels and the seasons and fall and bears,
stuff like that.
But as a hunter hunting for pigs in a place called Ukulele, part of the Waikamoi preserve
section, next to Waikamoi, Haleakalā Ranch land where the ranch pastures begin in the
forest still intact is but you still have the remnants of the old forest with ʻōhiʻa
trees and ʻōlapa trees, koa, and back then, we're hunting for pigs, and I thought, “Oh,
my God, this is what cattle and animals do to the forest.
They totally destroyed it.”
And they had no knowledge about endangered species and things like that.
And it was at that time that I told myself, “I want to protect the forests.”
And little did I know that that seven-year-old boy would be on top of Haleakalā mountain
protecting the forest (laughs).
Yeah, that's actually I think.
AK: Yeah.
And is that it or anything else you'd like to share?
We can shut off the recording now.
TR: I think that's enough.