Meet the Trail Hunter: Dr. Richard Stevens

Three and a half miles mauka from Kona International Airport, I park on the roadside at the edge of a dryland forest reserve and am greeted by Richard Stevens. He is fit, cheerful and dressed in several generations of camouflage clothing, from the Vietnam War onward. Behind his bushy white mustache and dark sunglasses, he looks very old and impossibly young at the same time. If you happened to spot him along the road as you drove by, you might think he was a sprightly pig hunter scouting for game. Actually, he's a lecturer in history at Hawai‘i Community College's center in West Hawai‘i. He's also the school's resident trail expert. It's not wild pigs he hunts, it's ancient Hawaiian trails.

Today he's leading a half dozen of his students and me on a walk along a segment of an ancient trail he has uncovered and has been working to restore for more than a year. It's part of the main trail that once ran the six-mile length of the Kaū ahupua‘a, connecting the largest fishponds on the arid Kona coast with the verdant upland breadfruit belt. The 1801 eruption of Hualalai volcano buried part of the original trail, and all of the fishponds, in lava. Other parts of the trail have been lost to an old ranching operation and modern development. But traces of the rest of it—and of hundreds of other lost trails all over Hawai‘i—can still be found. Or at least they can be found by someone with an eye for finding them.
Stevens definitely has the eye. He can spot telltale clues on the landscape—a few displaced "curb stones," a rock polished smooth by thousands of footsteps—that most of us would never notice. As a trail expert working for the state Department of Land and Natural Resource in the 1990s he documented hundreds of never-before-mapped ancient trails on Hawai‘i Island. As the go-to guy in land-use disputes involving Hawaiian trails, he's been called to testify in three cases where public access was at stake. Last year, in the most recent case, he helped prove that the state actually owns a historic trail to the summit of Haleakala even where it crosses a ranch that claimed it was the owner.
But today Stevens is in teaching mode. His students all have that just-out-of-high-school look, but they're incredibly attentive. I’m expecting a nature walk and a history lesson, with some ecology and geology thrown in. I'm also hoping to gain some insight into how Stevens finds lost trails. I brought a satellite photo of the area we're in today, and I ask Stevens if he can show me where we're going today. He can't. The only way to know this trail, he says, is to walk it from the ancient forest down among the lava caves.
Before we set out, Stevens tells us, "Walk, don't talk—and contemplate. This trail is about connections, nature and love." The students then say a prayer before silently following Stevens downhill, from the forest's edge toward the moonscape of brown and black lava, pocked with fountain grass. I came expecting a nature walk, and now I'm not sure what to expect.

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This trail is nothing like the well-marked trails in a national park. In places it's a narrow footpath worn into the ground. In other places its cobbled with black lava stones the size of your fist, or it's a collection of ruts that twist, merge and overlap. Some ruts veer off to destinations unknown and are swallowed by eruptions of fountain grass, an invasive species that spread throughout this land during the 150 years or so that it was part of Hu‘ehu‘e Ranch.
Nearby seven hundred and twenty-five acres of that former ranch are slated for the Pālamanui Hiluhilu Development Project, a master planned community that will include a business park, shops, a small hotel and—over the next thirty years—1,116 new homes. The project was planned in conjunction with the development of the new Pālamanui campus of Hawai‘i Community College, which is being built on 350 abutting acres. (Classes begin this fall). Archeological surveys have identified many significant cultural sites adjacent to the new campus, such as petroglpyhs, habitation caves, agricultural mounds and even trail segments. But it wasn't until the college's resident trail expert got involved that an unbroken two-mile stretch of the Kaū ahupua‘a's old mauka-makai trail reemerged intact. Nobody knows what this trail was originally called, but for now Stevens refers to it as the Pālamanui trail.

After walking in silence for a while we stop to rest in the shade of a thirty foot lama tree. It's gnarled and not very impressive to me. Stevens, however, believes that lama trees may be far older—and therefore far more impressive—than anybody knows. "I might be proven wrong someday, but I think this tree is fifteen hundred years old," he says, putting his hand on its mossy bark. "It was living here when the first humans walked this land." That was a cool thought, and Stevens lets us contemplate it for a while. Despite the proximity to the airport, this place is silent and good for contemplation. "The Hawaiians revere the lama tree for its calming, healing effects," Stevens says. "The kupuna would rest here. The young would gather around and listen. This tree is a classroom, and I'll bet this is the first class to be held here in hundreds of years."
Along with Stevens' passion for uncovering the highways of ancient Hawai‘i comes a passion for native reforestation. Since 2005 he's led an ongoing project to remove non-native plants from the West Hawaii Veterans Cemetery and replace them with Hawaiian dryland species. Now he organizes monthly work parties for a similar effort along the Pālamanui trail, tapping the same pool of volunteer labor. As a college instructor, he also recruits his students to help. He calls his student volunteers the "trail rangers," and he has a vision for a trail ranger program at the new campus that will pay students to work on the trail and serve as an incubator for professional eco-tour guides. But right now all the helpers are there on their own time. “That’s what I meant when I spoke of love earlier," Stevens says. "This trail exists because of this love for the land.”

Two of Stevens' trail rangers are with us today, both of them young Hawaiians barely out of their teens They spend a lot of time along the Pālamanui trail pulling up moisture-robbing fountain grass from around the lama trees. This will help the trees flourish and produce their edible berries, called pi‘oi. More pi‘oi means more seeds which will eventually mean more lama trees.

Micah Wang is one of the trail rangers. "I get into this peaceful, meditative state when I'm out here," he says. "It's like surfing, when the hours fly by and nothing else matters." I find this refreshing to hear from a member of the generation sometimes accused of being fused to digital devices. Makame Quinn is the other trail ranger among us today. She regularly spends quiet afternoons beneath one particular lama she's drawn to; it's almost like it picked her instead of the other way around. She feels a sense of calm there, and sometimes more. "We were working one evening when I felt the presence of a man," she says. "A spirit." Listening in, Stevens agrees there's a spiritual vibe about this place. "Wait 'til you get a load of the caves," he says, sensing my skepticism.

As we move down the trail toward the caves, Stevens uses his informed imagination to sum up how life here once was. The lama trees flourished, stretching all the way to the coast. When travelers got hungry they could always snack on a few pi‘oi. On either side of the trail, between the lama trees, sweet potatoes and yams grew on lava rock mounds. The mounds were packed with mulch, which held moisture and produced humus. Despite the lack of rainfall and soil, this was productive land. Each trail intersection would be a meeting place where a traveler might stop and talk with other travelers. And if a traveler needed shelter, there were the caves.
This is all very interesting, but I still want to know how Stevens finds these trails. “If you find a footpath in the woods and wonder if it was once an ancient trail, look where it leads," he tells me. "Were there ancient settlements along the way?” Most settlements in Hawai‘i were mapped, but the trails were not. An archeologist might dig, but a historian can look at a map and infer. "Trails aren't just little roads, they connect communities physically, emotionally and spiritually," he says. This makes sense to me. But then he also says this: "Sometimes you can feel the spirit of the trail rising up through the soles of your feet."

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Clearly Stevens operates on some different level. I get the sense that he has tapped into a sort of understanding that comes from a lifetime of study. He's been captivated by trails his whole life, ever since he was a boy in Iowa and his grandparents showed him an old Indian trail that ran through the woods by his house. His fascination with trails continued after he joined the fight in South Vietnam as a U.S. Marine. The Vietcong guerillas and North Vietnamese Army brought materiel and manpower to the fight from Cambodia and Laos via a secret supply route known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Concealed by jungle canopy, the trail could not be found from the air to attack. Stevens, confronted with the opportunity of a lifetime, went in search of the infamous trail on several occasions, eventually finding it then guiding a raid. Some veterans say the words "Ho Chi Minh Trail" with venom, but Stevens says them with reverence. He later did his dissertation on the trail and published two books about it as well. In one he described the moment he set foot on the trail like this: "It vibrated with energy. Qi or life force. It was alive!"

About a half mile down the Pālamanui trail we come to the first caves. They're a stone's throw off the trail and hidden in a low stretch of vegetation. Some are barely large enough to crawl through, and they feel spooky. But caves like this were vital to human life here. What little rain the area gets soaks into the ground, and gourds would be set in these caves to collect drinking water as it seeped through the rocks, one drip at a time.
Stevens takes us farther downhill to a cave big enough to park a school bus in. It’s cool and damp inside. I can't say I feel the presence of spirits, but I do feel a peaceful, safe vibe there. Stevens thinks this was a place of refuge, a place to rest before the long journey uphill. Outside this massive cave I stood to get my bearings; there was no way to spot this place from the surroundings. It might be difficult to spot from a low-flying plane. Still, Stevens led us right to it.
I don't discover much on this day about how Stevens actually finds lost trails. But I do get a sense that the veil of time has lifted for me ever so slightly. I get a sense of the quiet, calm energy of the Kaū ahupua‘a, and how life in this ahupua‘a must have once been. I come away believing that, as Stevens says, trails really are paths through time. "I think one of the things that jazzes people when they come out here," he says, "is they really find themselves walking through time. When you're out here and your putting your feet where the early Hawaiians used to put their feet, and touching the rocks they touched, and sitting under the trees they sat under, it's a magical feeling."

This story first appeared in Hana Hou, the Hawaiian Airlines Magazine.

Photos by Jack Wolford