What is the oldest tree in Hawaii?
No tree in this cluster has a documented age, and that is the honest answer rather than a gap we are hiding: Hawaii's Exceptional Trees law (Act 105) records girth and condition, not planting dates, and none of the six carries one. The biggest trunk is the Larger Ohi'a Lehua at 4.39 metres round, holding the upper canopy of the Kalopa Nature Trail, which makes it the largest here rather than provably the oldest, because girth runs at very different speeds from one species to the next and ohi'a in particular is a notoriously slow grower. Three of the six register entries also carried height figures well beyond what their species are documented to reach anywhere else, which this page has excluded rather than repeated. If you know the age of any of these trees, tell us and it goes on the page.
Hawaii protects trees in an unusual way and it shapes this page. Act 105 of 1975 lets each county designate individual specimens as exceptional trees, and the designation attaches to the tree rather than the land, which is why the register names single trunks along a park trail rather than the forest around them. The database is public domain and covers all four counties, but it carries no age field, and three of its height figures for this cluster (a 184-foot koa, a 170-foot hame, an 84-foot kopiko 'ula) do not hold up against how tall those species grow anywhere else, so no heights appear here. Its coordinates are also rounded to about a kilometre, with all six Kalopa entries sharing a single point, so every pin here is marked approximate. Rather than leave them on that rounded grid point, all six are pinned at the park itself, which is where you park and where the loop starts. What is solid is the girth, recorded for every tree, and the park: Kalopa protects roughly a hundred acres of old growth native Hawaiian forest, one of the more intact stands left on the island, reached by a short marked loop.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.