The Kalopa Koa

Almost none of Hawaii's native lowland forest is still standing. This koa grows in about a hundred acres of it that survived, one of the last old growth stands of native Hawaiian rainforest on the Big Island. Koa grows nowhere else on earth. Hawaiians cut it for ocean-going canoes and surfboards, furniture makers have wanted it ever since, and that is a fair part of why so little old koa survives anywhere. This one carries a trunk 3.66 metres round, it is listed by name in the state's register of exceptional trees, and it was rated in good health when surveyors last looked at it. It stands on the 0.7 mile nature trail that loops out from the park office. The Hamakua coast below spent a century under sugar cane and is now pasture and timber plantation. This pocket kept its own species instead, roughly twenty-five natives along the trail, several of them present as a single individual. Nobody has dated it. The girth is on the record and the years are not, so if you know of a ring count or a survey, tell us and it goes on the page. The park is free and open from seven in the morning until eight at night. The loop takes half an hour if you walk it without stopping, which you will not.