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Tourist dollars will further conservation
by Charlotte Woolard - The Garden Island
Keith Robinson stood in a clearing overlooking Olokele Canyon, its peaks dipped in clouds, its striated walls and ridgelines balding into patches of deep-red soil.
It is a view that tradewinds often wrap in a rainbow, a view from the only authorized stop-over site for helicopter tours on Kaua‘i.
And it is a view of one of the biggest problems facing the Olokele watershed and others like it.
“If my dad came back here and saw this bare dirt, he’d throw up,” said Robinson, who owns the ridge he stands on and recently secured rights to lead eco-tours from the site.
Those tours, slated to begin next year, will fund a soil conservation project that goes beyond permit conditions set by the county to combat erosion on his 10-acre parcel, Robinson said.
The view from private land has been accessible to the general public only through the film “Jurassic Park.”
A successful eco-tourism project will demonstrate the potential of something Robinson has advocated: “Money from tourism would be used to conserve the land,” he said. “It can be done, and I’m about to prove it.”
The county asked Robinson to build an electric fence to keep out cattle, goats and pigs that feed on groundcover and strip the earth of the layer that sponges up rain.
Without that layer, water runs across the bare dirt, picking up sediment and carrying it into the gulch that cuts through the property.
The gulch bleeds into the Olokele River, gathering color as it merges with the Makaweli River and then the Waimea River, finally delivering the sediment to the coral reefs that front Lucy Wright Park, said Lex Riggle, district conservationist with the Natural Resource Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“If you get an inch or two of rain that’s not soaking in on 100 acres, you get 100-acre inches.”
The sediment collected in the rain chokes streams, causing water to create new routes — and new erosion, Riggle said.
So a fence to keep animals from rooting up groundcover would decrease the amount of sediment flowing from Robinson’s property to the ocean and help decrease downstream erosion.
But Robinson also decided to experiment with strategies the county had not requested. He said he now spends about six days a week constructing a series of cement and stone dams that stop sediment in the gulch.
When he led Riggle through the area last week, those dams had already stepped the ground, halting what Robinson estimated as about 30 inches of soil in some places.
“I’ve got to show progress in two years,” he said. “I think I can show it already in the gulch.”
Robinson also had crawled on hands and knees through an area adjacent to the gulch, killing spindly guava trees and hacking the carcasses up to fill areas of the gulch.
The invasive plants go hand in hand with erosion, Riggle said, because the tall canopy shades the spongy ground cover, creating unfavorable conditions for native species and opening the door for erosion.
That erosion in turn diminishes the quality of the soil, cutting into its capacity to host native plant life, he said.
This idea is nothing new to Robinson, who has spent decades revising best practices for the cultivation of rare native species.
“Hawai‘i’s native plants evolved for years in isolation, and they lost their competitiveness,” he said, later pointing out that the invasive guava can grow even on eroded areas.
Plans for the tour stop include a botanical garden populated by native plants, though Robinson is not eager to disclose the name of any particular variety.
The garden, coupled with the canyon view, will be the focus of 10- to 20-minute stops for visitors flown in by Safari Helicopters. Robinson and Preston Meyers, the owner of Safari, won county permits for the venture — the island’s only authorized helicopter tour stop-over — in August.
“We went through the legal process and got a legitimate permit,” Meyers said, adding that he and Robinson had scouted different locations.
The grassy clearing atop the ridge became an obvious choice, the men said, because it gives pilots an area and an air flow for recovery from any problems encountered on take-off or landing.
“If they can land on top of a ridge, they go hog wild,” Robinson said. “If there’s a view, all the better.”
It is a view that tradewinds often wrap in a rainbow, a view from the only authorized stop-over site for helicopter tours on Kaua‘i.
And it is a view of one of the biggest problems facing the Olokele watershed and others like it.
“If my dad came back here and saw this bare dirt, he’d throw up,” said Robinson, who owns the ridge he stands on and recently secured rights to lead eco-tours from the site.
Those tours, slated to begin next year, will fund a soil conservation project that goes beyond permit conditions set by the county to combat erosion on his 10-acre parcel, Robinson said.
The view from private land has been accessible to the general public only through the film “Jurassic Park.”
A successful eco-tourism project will demonstrate the potential of something Robinson has advocated: “Money from tourism would be used to conserve the land,” he said. “It can be done, and I’m about to prove it.”
The county asked Robinson to build an electric fence to keep out cattle, goats and pigs that feed on groundcover and strip the earth of the layer that sponges up rain.
Without that layer, water runs across the bare dirt, picking up sediment and carrying it into the gulch that cuts through the property.
The gulch bleeds into the Olokele River, gathering color as it merges with the Makaweli River and then the Waimea River, finally delivering the sediment to the coral reefs that front Lucy Wright Park, said Lex Riggle, district conservationist with the Natural Resource Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“If you get an inch or two of rain that’s not soaking in on 100 acres, you get 100-acre inches.”
The sediment collected in the rain chokes streams, causing water to create new routes — and new erosion, Riggle said.
So a fence to keep animals from rooting up groundcover would decrease the amount of sediment flowing from Robinson’s property to the ocean and help decrease downstream erosion.
But Robinson also decided to experiment with strategies the county had not requested. He said he now spends about six days a week constructing a series of cement and stone dams that stop sediment in the gulch.
When he led Riggle through the area last week, those dams had already stepped the ground, halting what Robinson estimated as about 30 inches of soil in some places.
“I’ve got to show progress in two years,” he said. “I think I can show it already in the gulch.”
Robinson also had crawled on hands and knees through an area adjacent to the gulch, killing spindly guava trees and hacking the carcasses up to fill areas of the gulch.
The invasive plants go hand in hand with erosion, Riggle said, because the tall canopy shades the spongy ground cover, creating unfavorable conditions for native species and opening the door for erosion.
That erosion in turn diminishes the quality of the soil, cutting into its capacity to host native plant life, he said.
This idea is nothing new to Robinson, who has spent decades revising best practices for the cultivation of rare native species.
“Hawai‘i’s native plants evolved for years in isolation, and they lost their competitiveness,” he said, later pointing out that the invasive guava can grow even on eroded areas.
Plans for the tour stop include a botanical garden populated by native plants, though Robinson is not eager to disclose the name of any particular variety.
The garden, coupled with the canyon view, will be the focus of 10- to 20-minute stops for visitors flown in by Safari Helicopters. Robinson and Preston Meyers, the owner of Safari, won county permits for the venture — the island’s only authorized helicopter tour stop-over — in August.
“We went through the legal process and got a legitimate permit,” Meyers said, adding that he and Robinson had scouted different locations.
The grassy clearing atop the ridge became an obvious choice, the men said, because it gives pilots an area and an air flow for recovery from any problems encountered on take-off or landing.
“If they can land on top of a ridge, they go hog wild,” Robinson said. “If there’s a view, all the better.”
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