Night Hike

I wrote an email to Rosemary Gillespie (the foremost specialist on Tetragnathid spiders of Hawaii) after returning from the expedition to the Alakai swamp. She examined my photos and told me she was also positive they were not D. raptor. She then tells me:

As I think I mentioned, I have found by far the
greatest abundance of D raptor right against the
pali (right at the waterfalls) along the Na Pali
coast (Hanakapiai, Waiahuakua, Hanakoa, etc).

Somehow I missed this piece of vital information. I reread all our previous email correspondences, and her papers, and found no specific references to this area. I had hiked all along that trail way back when I did the Kalau Valley hike and did sample some waterfall areas on the trail but I never realized that this was the place they are the most abundant. Particularly since I never caught any on my original Kalau valley hike.

I became reinvigorated by this new piece of information and decided that I would do the 8 mile hike to Hanakapiai falls and do a search.

I figured that since the sun sets around 7:30 pm, I could leave for the falls at 5:30 and get there just before sunset, I would work into the night and then hike back out using a headlight. The 2 mile portion of the trail to Hanakapiai beach is very well traveled and easy to follow. At the beach you turn to walk into the valley following along the stream created by the fall 2 miles in.



This is a picture of the valley as I just started the trail inward. The second portion of the trail, into the valley can be quite sketchy at times because the number of people who make it this far greatly diminishes so the path can become obscure in some places.