Sheep Station

Approaching the sheep station (c. 6,000 ft). Just before the shack there is a gate saying "No Trespassing" with ownership by the Bishop Estates and Kamehamahama School District" which might seem to bar further access. But there is a parallel road that bypasses this gate so you can always claim you didn't see the sign. There seem to be no shortage of signs trying to keep you out of the area but they're all a bit run down. And then there is the bigger issue of the long and undeniable disintegration of access rights for Hawaiians over the years. In this regard, it is conjectured that no one really heeds all these signs anyway. But I do leave that judgment to you. March 3, 2007. The grove of trees on the right is a (failed?) "tree, grass, and legume" experimental forest undertaken by the Bishop Estate. There are a few other such experimaents higher up the mountain. They were all abandoned experiments, as far as we could tell. One forest is of fragrant eucalyptus, though. In his wonderful book "Hawaii: The Big Island Revealed," Andrew Doughty says this about the Bishop Estate: "Unfortunately [Hualalai] is all owned by Bishop Estate, which routinely denies access to the public. (Bishop Estate is a trust set up in the 1800s to help Hawai'i's kids. It has grown to where it now owns 11% of the state and has astonishing power. Many of the houses you see on the island are actually on Bishop land leased for several decades by individuals.)" Apparently, what's good for the kids isn't good for the parents of the kids or anybody else for that matter. My best advice for you if you want to climb Hualalai is to be a bad bad bad boy. Or be an errant paraglider.