Search for Turek unearths new problem on trail

WAILUA — Charlie Cobb-Adams led a search into Hanakapi‘ai and Kalalau in the search for Bradford Turek, who has been missing since January.

While he didn’t find Turek in the mid-March search, he found a Kalalau Trail that was dangerous, perhaps laden with disease, and in serious need of maintenance.

“The Na Pali Coast is the worst trail system I’ve ever seen as far as erosion,” said Cobb-Adams.

“The footing is very unstable. Your tread is most vital,” said the trail-building specialist in an interview last week at a Wailua restaurant.

“When you have a stable tread to walk on, all aspects of conservation can be done. Experts, including biologists, rescue personnel, state employees, (and the public) can do the job more efficiently with a stable tread.”

Cobb-Adams, on his unfruitful search for the 29-year-old Cincinnati, Ohio, native, found Kaua‘i’s most famous trail has eroded, leaving roots, narrow gullies, and mud that can carry leptospirosis and cause slips and falls.

“It’s not so much high usage (that’s caused the problems),” he said. “It has to do with (lack of) proper design and maintenance,” he added. “Water maintenance is key.”

And a state official agrees that maintenance is needed to stem the erosion, but believes that the trail is not dangerous.

Wayne Souza, Kaua‘i state parks district superintendent with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, said last week state officials are aware that the most famous hiking trail on Kaua‘i, and a trail often ranked in the top 10 hiking trials in the country, has been long overdue for maintenance.

An overhaul is needed, said Souza.

“It’s embarrassing,” the condition of the trail, said Sue Kanoho, executive director of the Kaua‘i Visitors Bureau. Agency and business representatives spend millions of dollars a year to encourage people to visit Kaua‘i, and the trails are a mess, she said.

“We have to get more attention for our facilities, trails and roads,” she said.

The first two miles, the trail to Hanakapi‘ai, gets 200 to 300 visitors a day, said Cobb-Adams estimates. Those miles “are not dangerous, but badly eroded,” Souza said in a phone interview last week. “You have to put in water bars.”

Water bars, which control water run-off by controlling the flow over a trail with blocks of wood, have been eroding steadily throughout the trail, leaving rotted boards and exposed rebar.

When the water bars cease doing their jobs, Cobb-Adams said, water runs directly onto the trail, leaving standing water, exposed roots, uneven tread areas, and cutting down the width of the trail, generally making the trail harder to navigate.

The mud that accompanies the run-off can also cause environmental concerns, Cobb-Adams said, when the water from the trail runs directly into streams and the ocean and onto sensitive coral reef.

Maintenance is difficult, Souza said, because the one person who performs maintenance on the two-mile trail to Hanakapi‘ai is also in charge of maintaining the entire Ke‘e Beach area as well. So all he can do is cut brush to stem the erosion tide.

“We know we don’t have the staff to do the work,” Souza admitted. “We are looking into hiring a company” to perform some maintenance on the trail.

He hopes that could take place before the end of the state fiscal year in June, he said, and state funds are available for minor repair and maintenance.

A huge overhaul for some of the trail is in the works as well, with a re-routing of the trail between Hanakoa (around eight miles from Ke‘e) and Kalalau. The erosion on some of those areas cannot be controlled, and only scrapping the section and re-routing it will help, the state official added.

“We know it’s going to be a big job,” Souza said. “It gets very expensive and time-consuming.”

But Cobb-Adams, whose grandmother was born and raised in Kalalau Valley, has been asking the state to hire him to do the maintenance work for the past four years.

“The government, which should be helping, are shutting down people who want to help,” he said. “We’ve been waiting and waiting. I’ve been forced into a corner. Why wait for an accident to take place?”

It’s not for the money, he said, but because it is in his blood.

No one “can make a profit from conservation,” he said. “If I was a multi-millionaire, I’d do it for free.”

Cobb-Adams, who is a trail-builder, has trained in correspondence schools in wildlife conservation, and has 15 years experience in various aspects of wildlife conservation.

He believes he is the most qualified, both in skills and in genealogy, to do the work. He has also ran commercial tours to Kalalau, and helped maintain the trail before moving to the Mainland in 1994.

“Nobody is qualified at trail building over here besides me and my wife,” said Cobb-Adams. Tanya, his wife, a former Polynesian dancer in Honolulu, has trained with Cobb-Adams for nearly 10 years, building trails on the Mainland before the two returned to Kaua‘i four years ago.

The husband-wife team, operating a small business called Native Hawaiian Tours and Trail Conservation, has built a number of private trails on Kaua‘i, from Princeville Ranch to the Robin Rice Ranch in Kipu. They have also volunteered on a number of trails in Koke‘e, they said.

Using as much of the available surrounding flora as possible, the two do all work by hand, building retainer walls, log steps, water bars, easier swtichbacks, fords, barriers, and bridges.

The work is draining, and involves carrying up to 300-pound logs and crushing rock by hand, Tanya Cobb-Adams said.

State workers just do not have the training to do big design and trail-building work, besides the time constraints and lack of staff, Souza said.

While DLNR workers do receive on-the-job trail training, most of the trail-building information is supplied through manuals that are for other parks on the Mainland.

“We basically use trail manuals developed by others,” said Souza. They “didn’t (exactly) fit our situation” in some areas, he said.

Souza, however, points to the Canyon Trail in Koke‘e as an example of good work DLNR employees can do.

For three years, with the help of a number of volunteers and the Koke‘e Museum, Souza said, the Canyon Trail was restored and brought back to its original glory.

“Within a year, we’re going to be complete,” said Souza. “A lot if it has to do with the help in Koke‘e and the partnership with the Koke’e‘ Museum and volunteers.”

As for the search for Turek, Cobb-Adams, with a handful of other hand-picked Kaua‘i residents, including hunters, former residents of Kalalau, and outdoorsmen (and his wife, Tanya) searched the Kalalau trail for four days looking for any signs of Turek.

Turek’s family hired him to help search for Bradford Turek.

Besides initials on a tree in Hanakapi‘ai and a shirt found submerged in Hanakapi‘ai Stream, nothing was found.

Cobb-Adams, who was hired by the family after making two volunteer trips into Hanakapi‘ai, said he doesn’t believe Turek is hiding out in Kalalau. The evidence he discovered indicates Turek may have perished in Hanakapi‘ai Stream during a flash flood, and his body carried out to sea, he said.

“There is no evidence he ever made it to Kalalau,” Cobb-Adams said after spending two days there and two days in Hanakapi‘ai, interviewing valley “outlaws” and visitors.

The team searched the stream bed from the beach to miles inland, scouring every nook and cranny, he said.

Cobb-Adams even used binoculars to scour each area, looking for any sign of movement. They even searched at night, walking the trail with flashlights. But there was no sign of Turek.

“My men went above and beyond,” he added.

The last sighting of Turek was around January 25, when he left his rental car at Ke‘e and hiked into Hanakapi‘ai. He has not been seen since.

Cobb-Adams’ men, using masks and snorkels in Hanakapi‘ai Stream to search the bigger pools, found a shirt from Turek’s alma-mater, Duke University, in the stream, and his initials etched in a bamboo tree near the abandoned coffee mill.

The family, though, doesn’t believe the shirt was his, by the style of it, and they still hold out hope that Turek is alive.

“We did everything,” said Turek’s sister, Lauren.

Lauren’s fiancee believes that chances are, if he is still alive, he’s not in Hanakapi‘ai, either.

“The search was thorough. It’s very hard to know what happened,” said Lauren’s fiancee, Nicholas Perkin.

“The family is grief-stricken. They go through the range of emotions that come with the uncertainty of it all. It just isn’t the natural order of things.

“They’re worried about him,” Perkin added. “It’s as difficult a thing as a family can go through.”

The Tureks have had up to a $10,000 reward for information regarding the whereabouts of Brad Turek. Anyone with information may call the Kaua‘i Police Department dispatch line, 241-1711.

While Perkin earlier criticized KPD investigators, he said that most of that was caused by information gathered by a Cincinnati private investigator.

“DLNR and KPD really changed around” when the family got to Kaua‘i, said Perkin. “There was a stronger sense of cooperation. Once we were all on the same page, they were certainly more cooperative.”

Staff Writer Tom Finnegan may be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) or mailto:tfinnegan@pulitzer.net.