Lessee... today feels like an images day, unlike yesterday's text- and links-flavored one. If you haven't read it yet, go there for the plethora of cool and recommended weblog reads. So I'll just post some images from the hike to the L i did a couple days ago. Coming back from which, incidentally, I hyperextended my left knee a little bit, running back down the trail at deep dusk, perfectly serene in the knowledge (er, delusion) that I was only still 26 years old. Bah.

The sequence is from the beginning of the hike (around 3:30 p.m.) to the end, at dusk. Took me about an hour and a half from the trailhead to the L. I never made it up to David Malo's gravesite, at the top of the hill above the L, because by the time I got to the L itself I was exhausted and there was less than an hour of daylight left. And there was still about 150 feet of steep mountainside to the peak, from the bottom of the L.

I had followed the prescribed trail for a while, but since it was late in the afternoon, I decided to take a short cut... this is typical for me, as I usually deviate from hiking trails, preferring more adventurous routes. So, where I saw a likely trail spur, I left the main trail and headed straight up to the L, instead of continuing along the more circuitous switchback behind the hill up to the peak. It was harder than I thought, and definitely harder than it looks in these images. My quart of water sure came in handy. The route I took was steep, and in parts straight up the cliff face, and through thick and deep underbrush, and small trees. I couldn't see the L until I literally got to it, at the very lower-right tip of the figure.

The "L" looks really el-egant ;-) from way downslope, or in town, or even from far down the coast or at sea. Up close, it's brutally ugly--the earth is scored deeply, and those ruts would make perfectly good foxholes!--as this stitched panorama shows:

At the outjutting base of the L -- does anyone know if there's a precise term for that part of the letter?! -- you can see the 00 marks, which stands for the Lahainaluna High School class of 2000. [You can see a part of the HS campus in image #2 above, in the first row.] Each year's senior class is responsible for maintaining and tending the L. I was wrong about the white-painted lava rocks I mentioned in last Friday's weblog. The kids just dump that generic white powdery stuff on the ground... you know, like the chalk that they use to mark the lines along basepaths on baseball diamonds. Another nomenclature query, you Amerikanskis... is there an exact term for this, other than "chalk?" (Must be quite a chore to schlep sacks of that stuff up there! They have to use quite a lot.)

{ net.casting }
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