OUR HONOLULU

By Bob Krauss

John Verbiske's friends on the Big Island laughed at him when he said he spends his weekends looking for an old stagecoach trail. "Stagecoach? Whoever heard of a stagecoach in Hawai'i? Show me a map with a stagecoach trail on it."

Verbiske, a landscape gardener, admits he's never seen documentation of a stagecoach trail from the Volcano House down to Honu'apo on the Ka'u Coast. He heard about it from John Macdonald, a professor of marine science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Macdonald is the son of a famed Hawai'i volcanologist, the late Gordon Macdonald.

"So I started searching with my GPS (global positioning system instrument)," said Verbiske. "Do you want to come along the next time I go out?"

"I'll do better than that," I told him. "I'll document the trail for you. Back in the 1960s, a woman named Jessie Mathias told me she sailed on the Falls of Clyde from San Francisco to Hilo in 1906 with a deckload of mules ordered for the Volcano Stables operated by her father. The mules were for the stagecoach that took people to the Volcano House from Hilo.

"In the Sept. 11, 1904, issue of the Sunday Advertiser is a story about a trip from the Volcano House to Kona. The article says, 'From the Volcano House the traveler is taken to lower Ka'u by stage or lighter vehicles (then on by steamer to Kailua).' "

We set out on foot last Sunday morning with Verbiske's nephew, John Dvorak, to find a section of the stagecoach route between the Namakani campground area and the golf course. It's rolling lava wilderness with scattered 'ohi'a trees and tall grass, no road signs, not even ruts to mark the trail.

However, Verbiske has found a way to follow the stagecoach. He looks for broken glass. His theory is that the passengers got drunk as quickly as possible to ease the pain of jolting over bumps. The "dead soldiers" were pitched out of the window.

It was like a treasure hunt. In some places, the old stagecoach route is obvious because it's level. In other places, low spots have been filled in with rocks. It gets lost in tall grass. Verbiske, who grew up about a mile from Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, said there was an old prison at Namakani. He thinks prisoners built the stagecoach trail. We saw what appeared to be a rock quarry along the way.

The stagecoach route roughly parallels the present highway in places, wanders off in others. Besides glass, we saw a piece of old, broken file and stones of very dense, blue-gray basalt that must have been blasted out of the crater during the steam eruptions of 1790 or 1924.

In two hours, we checked out about a mile of stagecoach trail. Verbiske went home and put it on the map in his computer. He's finding unmapped foot trails indicating that the old Hawaiians traveled all over the volcano area to distant places. They must have loved to go visiting.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.