Growing up in Nanakuli, Thomas Anuhealii could look up toward the Waianae Mountains and see Palehua, but "no one we knew could come up here," he says. You had to know someone to get past the two gates leading up the mountain. Now Anuhealii, once cut off from the mountain, is one of its caretakers, helping to maintain its roads and grant access. Or, as he says, "caregiver. I care to give of myself because this place has cared to give to me. And I would classify a caregiver of Palehua as anybody that actually lives here. Because they give something of themselves to exist in the space."
Anuhealii lives in a cabin with an open-air, screened-in living room overlooking the pa, a stone enclosure about four hundred years old. Anuhealii was a member of a Kapolei Hawaiian Civic Club that was invited to help uncover the ancient cultural site in 2000. "It was 100 percent amazing ... to realize that it was right here, in the uplands above," he says. They cleared the shrubs and trees, "and with the assistance of about forty horses from a nearby rancher, we were able to get all the grass down" to expose the stacked stones. At the time, "we called it a heiau [temple] for lack of a better term," he says. But more recent archaeological findings point to the pa as a gathering place for the rituals, celebrations and sporting matches during the Makahiki season, a period dedicated to Lono, a Hawaiian god of fertility, agriculture and rainfall. The four-month season begins with the rising of Makalii (the Pleiades star cluster), which the enclosure is aligned to.
Anuhealii returned regularly to the pa to "malama aina [care for the land] and practice our Hawaiian culture with consistency, routine and discipline. It was nice because [these places] weren't something that you easily could find down below back then. It allowed me to grow, to engage with the ancestors that left remnants of their existence in this space. What can we learn from them to make ourselves better now and going forward, and give us the ability to do at least what they did for us?"
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(LEFT) Thomas Anuhealii , one of the caretakers of Palehua, a mountain in Oahu's Waianae range that remains mostly untouched by commerce and development. Right, a view of the Leeward coast from Palehua. (RIGHT) The pa, a four-hundred-year-old stone enclosure discovered on Palehua in 2000, might have been used in ancient times as a gathering place for rituals, celebrations and sporting matches.
Still, when he was offered the job to be one of Palehua's caretakers in 2010, he hesitated. At the time, he was working as a bus driver, "a dream job because you got to see the breadth of the people," he says. But ultimately, he decided to commit to Palehua. He says, "The mountain chooses you."
Though the private preserve is just ten minutes from the Costco in Kapolei, Palehua has long had a mystical air. Late one night in the early '90s, in a simple cabin on its slope, Israel Kamakawiwoole and producer Jon de Mello watched the city lights below, all the way to Diamond Head, fade in and out of the clouds. Nearing midnight, they crafted the haunting version of "Hawaii '78," which would become one of the musician's most powerful songs. Amy Hanaialii recorded "Palehua" on the mountain-you can even hear the birds in the background. "E kahea mai ana/O Palehua e/wahi lani haupu iau" (Calling to me/is Palehua/a heavenly place), she sings.
And at the very top, at almost 2,800 feet, is Mauna Kapu, or sacred mountain. On a clear day it's the only place in Hawaii from which you can see all the islands at once.
Lately, Palehua has been popping up on Instagram feeds, thanks to the recent restoration of a cabin that famed Hawaii architect Vladimir Ossipoff built on its ridge in 1949, positioned for the best views of the Waianae range and the Leeward coastline. But the mountain is more than the Ossipoff cabin. About a dozen families live on Palehua, relying on rainwater and each other. "For us it's a way of life, it's a village," says Manu Aluli Meyer. "We help each other build things, we help each other plant things, harvest things. It's not for everybody but it's for everybody."
A professor in indigenous philosophy, Meyer invites students and people from the University of Hawaii up to her home, named Waolama, or place of illumination. The name "came in a moe uhane, gifted in my dreams," she says. "'Lama' is the word for knowledge, wisdom, illumination, and it used to be abundant in such spaces." On the eight acres that she rents, she's cleared invasive ironwoods and even the "beloved eucalyptus-it doesn't collaborate well," and planted native trees and shrubs like kukui, kou, milo, wiliwili, ohia lehua, lama, hinahina and akia. "I want to expose the kids to this kind of lifestyle," Meyer says, "and to what the forest might have looked like two hundred years ago. It's a spacious place to understand ike kupuna, the knowledge of our elders." But she, like many of Palehua's residents, worry about balancing accessibility with preserving what makes Palehua special. "Palehua is filled with cultural life and filled with history and filled with beyond beauty," she says. "Palehua is more than a place of recreation. It's a village, a cultural space for rejuvenation and renewed rituals. It's a place where we know each other, where we care for each other."
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McD Philpotts (LEFT) grew up on Palehua and along with Anuhealii is the mountain's caretaker. As a child he'd explore the slopes, which rise to 2,800 feet, and in his wanderings would come across evidence of an ancient past. "I'd be hiking through the grass down to the lowlands, and I get this feeling," he says. "Where's it coming from? And then I'd go that way and push the grass aside, and there'd be a cultural landscape."
The first time I tried to get a hold of McD Philpotts, he was dealing with the aftermath of a storm, clearing the roads of downed trees and rocks. The second time, a power pole fire, which caused a blackout on the entire mountain for the whole day. Living on Palehua is wild and difficult. Philpotts says that even in pre-contact times, it was unusual for Hawaiians to reside at this elevation. They lived closer to the shoreline, where resources like food and fresh water were more abundant-Palehua is relatively dry and wildfires are a constant threat. But the mountain provided a strategic position: From Mauna Kapu you could see anyone coming from miles. It's the reason that immediately after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, the military occupied the mountain. Its abandoned remnants still exist on Palehua-pillboxes, an old bunkhouse and mess hall, underground fuel tanks (with fuel remaining)-and the Coast Guard continues to operate a tower at the top. In addition, telecommunication companies plant their towers here and help to keep the road paved. But Mauna Kapu is more than strategic; it's also spiritual, as its name implies. Philpotts theorizes that the Hawaiians who once lived up here were "more on the kahuna side than the 'let's build a big army and be warriors' side," he says. "They're living here because they're connected to the things from before."
You could say the same of Philpotts. He is a descendant of wealthy landowner James Campbell and a Native Hawaiian woman of chiefly lineage named Kuaihelani. The unofficial historian of Palehua has lived here for most of the past fifty years. "This place raised me; this place made me who I am, how I think, what I value," he says. When he was 12 his parents moved from Lanikuhonua, at the ocean's edge, up to the slopes of Palehua. His cabin is one of the military surplus houses on the mountain, hauled up there after the war when the military had a few extra on hand.
As a child, whenever he got the chance, "I would take a dog or a horse or just water and boots and go overnight. That's how I found a lot of things up here. I'd be hiking through the grass down to the lowlands, and I get this feeling-where's it coming from? And then I'd go that way and push the grass aside, and there'd be a cultural landscape." When he was younger he thought he found these places on his own, but now he feels that his ancestors were guiding him.
After 125 years, the first cabin built on Palehua in 1897 (ABOVE, as it was circa 1948) remains largely unchanged. Built by Harry Martens von Holt (BELOW), whose work included prospecting for water on Palehua, the cabin still has some of its original shingles and windows. -PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY Matthew PS Chapman
Today, in addition to his work managing a herd of about seventy cattle and as an artist-his woodwork accents many of the resorts along the coast below Palehua-he is also the caretaker for half of the mountain. Anuhealii cares for the other half. In 2009 the Gill family and Edmund Olson bought Palehua from the Campbell Estate, and each owns half, from Mauna Kapu to the top of Makakilo, divided by Palehua Road. James Campbell once owned almost the entire ahupuaa of Honouliuli, Oahu's largest, which included Palehua. He had come to Hawaii from Ireland in 1850 and became one of Hawaii's largest landowners. He started a sugar plantation in Lahaina, but Palehua, in particular the upper slopes, never supported much agriculture, and as in the rest of Hawaii, feral pigs, goats and other invasives quickly destroyed its native ecosystem.
The two owners of Palehua share a vision of restoration and preservation. The Edmund C. Olson Trust's holdings include conservation and ag lands on Oahu and Hawaii Island. Olson, now 90, built his wealth with businesses in concrete and self-storage primarily on the Mainland. "Back then I was out making money, trying to make my way in the world, spraying concrete all over the place. That's all I knew," Olson told Ko Olina's publication Hale in 2018. "Later, I was able to softly look at the world in a different way, and I said, 'Gee, I don't really want to spray concrete. I've sprayed enough.'"
The other owner, the Gill family, has been active in politics and environmental advocacy for generations. In the 1960s, Lorin Gill was among the founders of the Hawaii chapter of the Sierra Club. He is considered by many the father of environmental education in Hawaii. Gary Gill, his nephew and one of the family's leads on purchasing Palehua, has a "planning horizon that's two hundred years" for the mountain. "From an environmental standpoint, this land has been abused and neglected for two hundred years, and it's going to take multiple generations to restore it," he says. "Honestly, you can never restore something to how it was. ... It'll never be back to what it was exactly." But they will try, removing invasives and reforesting with natives.
The Malama Learning Center, which engages communities in West Oahu through culture and caring for the land, works with both landowners in its current projects. But founder Pauline Sato's ties to Palehua go even further back, when she was mentored by Lorin Gill in the mid-1980s and brought to the mountain on a ridge hike. The Malama Learning Center partners with Camp Palehua-formerly known as Camp Timberline starting in the early 1960s-where schoolchildren bunk in former horse stables. They used to bond on ropes courses, but under the Gills' ownership, the camp is moving toward more environmental and cultural programs. Higher up the slope, the nonprofit operates a nursery on Olson property, growing thousands of native plants acclimated to the dry-mesic forest of the Waianae Mountains and outplanting them across Palehua "to help heal and restore the land," Sato says. In some ways these programs have made the mountain more accessible, inviting youth and teachers to learn more about the Waianae ecosystem and the cultural history of Palehua-and to join in the work. For Gary Gill it's a balance between throwing Palehua's gates wide open and, "in the words of my dear uncle, to lead people into the forest so they will learn to love it and work to protect it."
If the yellow lehua stump goes, Palehua cabin will vanish. So Matthew Chapman thinks. In the family's legends, when his great-grandfather built the cabin in 1897, "a yellow lehua sprung up at the northeast corner of the cabin, indicating to the Hawaiians who knew him that he had mana," Chapman says. And when he died, so did the tree. But the stump remained. "And in the 1980s and '90s, it started to lean over, and this koa tree sprung up and caught it in the crook of its arm. Until seven years ago that tree was holding it up. And then somebody thought it was dirtying the rain gutters, and lopped off the koa tree and killed it. But that tree is still there and that stump is still there. ... If you pull that yellow lehua stump out of the ground, this will all unravel. Poof! Like Brigadoon, it will just go. It's like spiritually that yellow lehua stump is the reason that 125 years later we still have this cabin, and it's somehow holding the fabric together."
Restoration efforts on Palehua aim to reverse centuries of ecological damage by removing invasive species such as ironwood trees (and using the wood for fence posts and houses around Oahu), reforesting with native Hawaiian plants, improving elepaio (native flycatcher) sanctuaries and maintaining "snail jails," which protect endangered tree snails.
Life on the mountain can feel tenuous, a combination of its wildness, the threat to that wildness and exposure in a modern world-and the short-term leases that all of its tenants hold. When the Campbell Estate Trust dissolved and Palehua was put up for sale in 2008, Chapman was unsure of the fate of the cabin. His great-grandfather Harry Martens von Holt managed the ranch for Oahu Railway & Land Company, which had built and operated a railroad that went around three-quarters of Oahu, from Kahuku to Kaena. The rail took von Holt to the base of the mountain-the rest of the way up was by horse. He had constructed the first cabin, which he named Palehua, on the mountain. (It's likely that Palehua-which may mean "enclosure of the lehua"-got its name from von Holt's retreat, for the name doesn't exist in records previous to the cabin's existence.) And upon seeing the denuded landscape, he planted thousands of acacia and eucalyptus trees, hiring people to water them by hand.
Palehua cabin's lease was passed down through von Holt's descendants. Chapman's father loved the place and brought his sons up on weekends-when he passed away, Chapman "preserved it like a museum," he says. His father's typewritten arrival and departure checklist for the cabin, nailed to the inside front door in 1975, remains there, though bugs have chewed away the edges. Chapman still has the cabin's original guestbook, dating back to 1930. "It's a real heart space for me," he says. "This is the reason I kept a hold of [the cabin]. It's half museum. It's preserving something that matters."
But it's more than the structure itself. A decade ago, when Chapman's daughters were around six years old, they'd play in the forest. "We'd call them in for dinner, and it'd be pitch-black dark." One of his daughters "came in with red dirt feet and twigs in her hair and said, 'It's not dark yet.' When she got inside and looked outside, she realized they'd been out there so long, their eyes had adjusted. And that was the gift of Palehua: being able to play in the forest at night safely, to be in the wind and the trees. That's magic."
Chapman hesitated to change anything about the cabin, partly for the past and partly for the uncertain future that accompanies three-year leases. But recently he finally painted it, updated the wiring and put in new furniture and beds-what was essentially a wooden box, unimproved for decades, had been on the verge of uninhabitable. It was his way, like many of the residents on Palehua, of caring for the mountain by remembering and reviving what once was. Their devotion reminded me of something Philpotts had said as he led me up Mauna Kapu to show me the cultural importance of the peak. I asked whether he thought it was the most sacred place in Hawaii. "No, because that's a dangerous perspective," he replied. "This is one of the most sacred places to me. Does it matter if [one place] is more sacred or less sacred? It doesn't. It just matters that there are people caring for all of them."
