Na'ili'ili-haele WaterFalls Cache

The Na'ili'ili-haele WaterFalls Cache geocache (GCHREH) was hidden on 23 November 2005 beside the Na'ili'ili-haele stream in Hawaii (USA). Reaching this cache was an Adventure with a capital “A”. The trail dives into a bamboo grove so dense that it hides the first waterfall a few steps off the path, then works its way up the stream from pool to pool: a ford, a rope along a rock face — since replaced by a ladder — and finally some thirty metres of swimming between two cliffs, before one last curtain of water a dozen metres high. The owners staged the expedition as a spy mission, warning never to risk it in the rain because of flash floods, and to read the cache logs first: many had got lost in the bamboo.

Those warnings said what mattered. Popularised by the guidebooks and then by social media under the name “Bamboo Forest”, the valley has become the main theatre of rescue operations on the road to Hana: broken legs, helicopter hoists, hikers cut off on the far side of the stream by a flood, and deaths. The valley is now fenced off and closed.

The cache followed suit: disabled and re-enabled several times, archived, unarchived, before being archived for good by the reviewer, for want of an answer from the owner. What remains are its logs, which read like gripping expedition accounts.
For anyone who would like to walk beneath the bamboo of Maui without climbing a fence, there is the Pīpīwai Trail, in Haleakalā National Park — but no geocache there (yet).