The Santa Barbara Independent:
The Big Island of Hawaii's Kohala Coast

By Matt Kettmann, January 3, 2007

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excerpt:

The next day, I found myself riding shotgun in a bus driven by Bob Fewell, a tour guide for Hawai‘i Forest and Trail, the concessionaires of choice for the KCRA. Sitting behind me were tourists from Southern California, Kentucky, and Toronto, all eager to embark on the easy but awe-inspiring “waterfall” hike up the Polulo Valley (pictured). polulo.jpg Fewell fueled us with more information about the island’s natural and cultural history than can fit in a book. Here are the highlights: the Big Island features 11 of the world’s 13 ecosystems (arctic and tundra got the boot); King Kamehameha, who united the island chain in the late 1700s, was born north of Kohala near the cute sugar-plantation-cum-artist-colony town of Hawi; and although Hawai‘i constitutes a miniscule portion of the landmass of the United States, it boasts more than 50 percent of its endangered species.

The hike had us following a cliff-hugging trail on private land that only Hawai‘i Forest and Trail enjoys access to. Along the way, Fewell kept the natural history tidbits coming, explaining which shrubs were the “canoe plants” brought by the first wave of Marquesan islanders when they settled this chain 1,200 years ago, why it might rain when you pick a lehua flower from the ‘O-hi‘a tree, and how the fuzz on ferns was used successfully by Hawaiians as a coagulant and not-so-successfully by the white folks who tried to make it into pillow stuffing … and so on. When we reached the final waterfall, a several hundred-foot-high beast that pours just over the trail, we scurried beneath the falls to get our picture taken (that's me in a photo taken by Fewell). And given that Fewell is a former photog for the daily newspaper-of-record West Hawaii Today, they all turned out winners.