Wailua River

About

Settlement of First Hawaiians, ~1000 AD. Hydrologically, the Wailua is an easy river to read. USGS gauge 16060000 records an average flow near 80 cubic feet per second against a historical baseline of 72 CFS, and the optimal paddling window runs from 20 to 200 CFS. The recorded maximum reaches 247 CFS, but for most of the year the river holds the flat, glassy character that made it a corridor for travel and ceremony rather than a whitewater run. That calm is the whole point: it is a place to move slowly and look up at the walls of the valley.

The watershed drains the eastern slopes of Mount Waiʻaleʻale, one of the wettest places on Kauaʻi, and gathers into a river that splits into two forks above the coast. The North Fork carries kayakers toward the Secret Falls, or Uluwehi Falls, trail, a jungle walk that ends at a cascade tucked into the interior. The South Fork offers a quieter paddle through a jungle corridor. From the mouth at Lydgate Beach Park, a common launch, it is about four miles upstream to the Fern Grotto, and the river feeds two main waterfalls, Opaekaa and Wailua.

The human story here is older than almost anywhere else in the islands. In the era before 1778, Wailua was the most sacred river complex in Hawaii and the seat of Kauaʻi's royal lineage. Seven heiau, or temples, stand along its course. Among them are the Hikinaakala Heiau, whose name means "rising of the sun"; the Holoholoku Heiau, the birthing stones where royalty had to be born to be considered aliʻi nui; and the Poliahu Heiau in the upper valley. Together these sites make up the Wailua Complex of Heiau, a National Historic Landmark.

The river's more recent history followed the arc of the islands' economy. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the Wailua watershed was logged to supply the regional timber industry of 1850 to the 1910s and the railroad expansion of the 1860s to the 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The exhaustion of the old-growth stands in 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s brought large-scale logging to a close. In parallel, the first comprehensive hydrological work on the river began with USGS surveys in the 1870s.

Modern tourism arrived in 1946, when Walter Smith launched the first Fern Grotto motorboat tour, carrying visitors two miles upstream to a natural amphitheater of hanging ferns. That tour has become one of the most-visited attractions in Hawaii and runs continuously to this day, with Hawaiian musicians playing the wedding song from the Fern Grotto for the passengers. The surrounding Wailua River State Park is open daily from seven in the morning until a quarter to eight in the evening. Between the heiau at the mouth and the falls upstream, few rivers in the islands hold so much history in so short a course.