Naz Ahmed to PATC-MS
show details 12/9/07 Reply

For those of you who find yourself on Oahu and wonder if any of the lovely vegetated ranges that collect rain very well have any non-vegetated climbing worthy crags, I actually managed to scope one out.

The "Moke Wall" is a cliff side on the SW side of the island with fifty or so climbing routes.  You can find directions on this website: www.rockclimbinghawaii.com .  We saw cliffs from the road, but completely missed the 30 minute hike on the established trail and bushwacked up boulders, dead and very wet vegetation and mud for two hours.  We were a sight to be seen, the stars of Lost look way too clean after running through the jungle.  We finally got to the wall, mud-covered, scratched, and bug-bitten.  What was super cool about the wall was almost every route we saw, had twine running from the ground, through the anchor rings, attached with a stick to the ground.  The sticks had the name of the route as well as the grade.  With that system, we pulled our rope through for a top-rope set up by tying a series of clove hitches with the twine to the end of our climbing rope.  We did one climb, a 5.7 called Veggie Crack.  It was pretty pleasant and fun despite the name, and the rating seemed appropriate for the grade.  We set up another top rope on Mr. Hook 5.8+ and after climbing half the the route realized it was too wet to finish.  With the ominous drops of rain from a more ominous looking cloud we finished up took the real trail back, much easier to navigate and very established (think stone steps in some places) but still a mud-fest, and went to the beach across the cliffs to rinse off.  Unfortunatley I didn't get a chance to return because it was very wet the rest of the week.   Apologies to those whose inbox I hose because of the .jpegs, the first pic is what the cliffs look like from the road, the second is the twine top rope set-up (because of erosion setting up above the cliffs is not advisable), and a colleague on Veggie Crack.

If it hasn't rained the morning or the night before, bringing a rope and personal climbing gear is worth the extra baggage on the flight to Honolulu. We climbed the wall right after the rain and found a majority of the routes were too wet to climb.