Stairway To Heaven

 This may be the only bad review ever written about the stairway to heaven on the island of Oahu. I consider myself a very active and adventurous person but I will be completely honest in saying that I never plan on revisiting this hike again. Everyone raves about this particular hike, but since doing it I have been scared to do anything like it again. It could have been that in order to attempt this hike we started at 12:00AM and pulled an all nighter, something I haven’t done since college. The fascinating thing that enticed me was the mysterious views promised by other survivors.  The stairs were originally installed in 1942 by the military to provide communication from one peak to another and have since been remodeled and closed to the public due to land owner disputes.  The night we went there was over one hundred people at the top; which shows many people are still checking the hike off their bucket list. It was a chilly cloudy night with promised rain showers, but we trekked on to climb 3,922 stairs to the top. It was a very steep crawl in what I considered a vertical ladder. In many cases if I lost my footing or the wet railing that was provided could not hold me I could have fallen to my death or been seriously injured. In the pitch black my fears were shaded by the unknown and I had no idea what lurked ahead. At the last platform I didn’t know if I had it in me to continue on and if it wasn’t for Andrew I wouldn’t have made it to the top. After making it to the top, sideways rain and 40 MPH gusts of wind blew us in every direction, where we begged the sun to rise so we could make our descent down in the light. It was 2 hours later we began down, soaking wet and freezing cold. I may have been the only person who cried and considered being rescued by helicopter from this hillside but with confidence I can say I made it down 7 hours later! I would recommend this hike to people in extremely good physical condition and to those who are not scared of heights. The experience will stretch your limits and push you farther than you ever thought possible.