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10/17/2026

More than a mile of trees, and nobody agrees who planted them.
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Part III of III — link in bio
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Most people meet Poʻipū through a tunnel. Turn off the highway onto Maluhia Road and the light changes. Tall swamp mahogany, a eucalyptus from Australia, lines both sides of the road and closes overhead into a green ceiling that runs more than a mile toward Kōloa. Maluhia means peace, or serenity. On a quiet morning it earns the name.
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The most-told story is tidy. In 1911, Walter Duncan McBryde, a sugar and pineapple man whose family name is all over the south shore, finished landscaping his estate at Kukuiolono and had about five hundred trees left over. Rather than waste them, he planted them along the road as a gift to the community.
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It’s a lovely story. It isn’t the only one.
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Another version credits the Knudsen family, then the big landowners along this stretch, who are said to have planted the trees to firm up a soggy road that bogged down wagons. A third says the rows were a windbreak for the cane fields on either side. Each version has its tellers, and none has a signed planting order to settle it.
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What’s not in dispute is that the tunnel used to be longer. Before the main highway was cut through, the canopy ran roughly three times its present length. Part of it was lost to the road that now delivers most visitors to its doorstep.
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And the timing fits the era. In the early 1900s, Hawaii was planting trees everywhere: along roads, on hillsides, around homes and fields. On plantation-era Kauai, the land was shaped for sugar, sometimes with dynamite, sometimes with a shovel and a row of saplings.
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Sugar is gone from the south shore now. The trees outlasted it, and they still do the one job everyone agrees on: they mark the way in.
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Whoever planted them, the road still says peace.
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10/14/2026

Poʻipū once had two blowholes. Sugar only wanted one.
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Part II of III — link in bio
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On Kauai’s south shore, the waves don’t just hit the coast. They go under it. Swells drive into a lava tube beneath a flat black shelf, the pressure has nowhere to go, and the water escapes through a narrow hole in the roof. Early Hawaiians called it a puhi, a blowhole. Today it’s Spouting Horn, and on a good swell it throws spray forty or fifty feet into the air with a hiss and a low roar.
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Hawaiian legend explains the sound. A great moʻo, a lizard guardian of this coast, is said to be caught in the puhi, and the moan you hear is the moʻo, still held in the rock.
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For a long time the coast had more than one voice. Island lore remembers a second blowhole nearby, bigger and louder than the one that survives.
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That would have been fine, except for what grew behind it. Kōloa, just up the road, is where Hawaii’s commercial sugar industry began in 1835, and over the following decades cane spread across the south shore, right up behind the rocks. Salt and sugarcane don’t mix. The wind carried brine off the plume and over the fields.
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The story told on Kauai is short. Around 1920, plantation officials had the bigger blowhole dynamited so the spray would stop reaching the cane. A squared-off hole in the rocks nearby is still pointed out as what’s left of it.
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Whether or not every detail holds, the shape of the story fits the era. Plantation Kauai rearranged the land for sugar: ditches, roads, fields, even rows of trees.
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The sugar is gone now. The surviving horn isn’t. Stand at the rail at Spouting Horn Park and watch the timing. The wave goes under, the shelf goes quiet, then the rock exhales. Some afternoons the spray catches the sun and hangs a rainbow over the lava.
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They silenced one. The other is still talking.
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10/12/2026

Hawaii’s sugar story started on twelve acres just up the road from Poʻipū. How? 👀
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Part I of III — link in bio
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On September 12, 1835, a young New Englander named William Hooper started clearing twelve acres near Kōloa, a few minutes inland from Poʻipū. His firm, Ladd & Company, had leased about 980 acres from the Hawaiian kingdom to try something no one had made work for long in the islands: growing sugarcane and milling it for sale abroad.
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It was a hard start. Hooper was a merchant, not a planter, learning cane as he went, with a crew of Hawaiian workers who cleared and planted the first fields by hand. There was hardly any cash on the island, so the company printed its own scrip, spent at the company store on cloth, tools and goods from the ships.
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The first mill was crude, with wooden rollers turned by animals. It started producing in November 1836. Within a year the wooden rollers were swapped for iron, the animals for water, and the plantation shipped its first real crop: about two tons of sugar and thousands of gallons of molasses.
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In 1841 a new mill went up beside the Waihohonu stream. The company itself went under within a decade. The industry did not.
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Other plantations followed across every island, and sugar became Hawaii’s largest industry for more than a century. It drew workers from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, whose families helped make Hawaii the place it is today. The Kōloa plantation, under a string of owners, kept growing cane until 1996.
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The 1841 mill’s stone chimney still stands in Kōloa, a National Historic Landmark at the edge of town. It’s easy to drive past.
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By the early 1900s, the cane had reached the coast at Poʻipū. And the coast pushed back.
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10/10/2026

In 2017, a mountain fell on Highway 1 and made California bigger.
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Part III of III — link in bio
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The road the prison crews blasted out of the cliffs has never been a sure thing. Every few winters, the mountains ask for it back.
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In February 2017, storms undermined the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge so badly it had to come down, cutting the heart of Big Sur off from the north. Then on May 20 the slope above Mud Creek let go. More than six million cubic yards of mountain came down at once, burying a quarter mile of highway and pushing roughly fifteen acres of brand-new land into the Pacific. It ranks among the largest landslides in California’s history. The map of the coast was redrawn overnight.
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Big Sur was an island again. For months, residents lived the pre-1937 way — hiking a steep trail around the missing bridge, carrying groceries in on their backs.
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The new bridge opened that October. Mud Creek took longer: rather than dig out the slide, Caltrans built the road right over it, and in July 2018, fourteen months after the mountain fell, Highway 1 ran end to end again.
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It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. A 1983 slide built the little beach under McWay Falls, where the water used to drop straight into the sea. Regent’s Slide shut the road again in 2024, and it reopened only this past January.
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That’s the deal on this coast. The otters survived because no road could reach them. The prison crews earned their way home cutting one through. The mountain still takes it back every so often — and every time, the road crews and the people who live here bring it home.
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10/07/2026

California’s most photographed road was blasted out of the cliffs by men serving time.
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Part II of III — link in bio
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For a century the Big Sur coast said no. The mountains fall straight into the sea, and the only land route turned eleven miles inland to get around one creek. Ranchers rode out for their mail. The most famous coastline in California was, for practical purposes, unreachable.
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The state approved a road in 1919 and crews broke ground in 1921. Then the money ran out. Work stalled at the end of 1924 with the hardest miles still ahead.
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In 1928 the state found its workforce at San Quentin. Three convict road camps went up along the coast — Little Sur River, Kirk Creek, Anderson Creek — and the men in them earned 35 cents a day plus time off their sentences: about one day of freedom for every two on the cliff. Some of them, quite literally, blasted their way home.
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They drilled, packed powder and cleared rock on ledges hundreds of feet above the surf, working alongside free crews hired for the job. Bixby Creek, the canyon that had forced the old road inland, got its concrete arch in 1932 — 714 feet long, 280 feet above the creek bed, finished under budget. The two towering buttresses at either end look like they carry the load. They are mostly there for looks.
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On September 18, 1934, two convict crews digging toward each other from opposite ends met and knocked out the last wall of rock between them. For the first time since the survey stakes went in, the cut ran unbroken along the cliffs — paving, guardrails and bridges still to come, but the coast’s rock wall had been beaten.
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In June 1937, sixteen years after the first shovel, the highway opened the full length of the coast. The wall had come down.
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The cliffs had other plans. Saturday: the day the mountain took the road back.
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10/05/2026

How do you hide an entire species for decades? 👀
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Part I of III — link in bio
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California wrote off its sea otters in the early 1900s. They hadn’t gone anywhere.
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For more than a century the fur trade worked this coast cove by cove — Russian, Spanish, British and American hunters chasing the densest fur of any animal alive, one pelt worth a small fortune in Canton. By the turn of the century the otters were gone from every beach a boat could reach, and California called them extinct.
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But one stretch of coast never let the hunters in. South of Carmel the Santa Lucia Mountains drop straight into the Pacific — no harbor, no landing, and the only road bent eleven miles inland to get around a single creek. Below those cliffs, in the kelp, a small raft of otters simply kept living.
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In 1938, the year after a new highway finally opened that coast, rancher Howard Granville Sharpe looked down from his land above Bixby Creek and counted about fifty of them. That June, Life magazine told the whole country the extinct sea otter had come back.
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Every southern sea otter you see from Highway 1 today descends from that hidden raft.
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And the coast got something back too. Otters eat sea urchins; without them, urchins mow kelp forests down to bare rock. Bring the otters back and the forest grows back — part of why the kelp you see from the Big Sur turnouts runs so thick.
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The road that revealed them took sixteen years of dynamite — and some of the hardest miles were blasted by men serving time. Wednesday: who built it.
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10/03/2026

Thirty-five years on Creek Street. She never threw anything away.
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Part III of III — link in bio
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Thelma Copeland arrived in Ketchikan in 1919, thirty-one years old, and bought the house at №24 Creek Street outright. The town knew her as Dolly Arthur. She would live in that house for the next fifty-six years.
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She was a businesswoman first. She owned the building, kept the books, paid the fines, and ran №24 through Prohibition, the Depression and the war, when the Navy filled the boardwalk and the creek ran with more than salmon. She was known for saying she preferred an old man’s kindness to a young man’s demands, and she chose her company accordingly. When the 1954 crackdown emptied the street, most of the women left town. Dolly locked the front door, kept the key, and stayed.
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She stayed twenty-one more years, in the same rooms, with the same furniture, the trapdoor still in the floor and the liquor still in the wall. She died in 1975 at eighty-seven. Nothing had been thrown out. The town looked at a house that had kept every receipt, every dress and every bottle of a half-century on the creek, and did the sensible thing: it opened the door and charged admission.
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Dolly’s House is a museum today, on the same pilings, over the same salmon run. The interpretive signs along the boardwalk tell her story in her own words and on the town’s own terms. Creek Street’s most famous resident never left, and Ketchikan never wanted her to.
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She kept the house. The house kept the story.
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Next Monday: a new town, a new “what’s with…”
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09/30/2026

Ketchikan built its most famous street on stilts so the town could pretend it wasn’t there.
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Part II of III — link in bio
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In 1903 the brand-new city council of Ketchikan passed an ordinance moving the town’s “female boarding houses” across Ketchikan Creek, onto pilings over the water, out of sight of Front Street. The women went. So did the salmon, the fishermen, the smugglers and, eventually, the tourists.
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Creek Street was never a street. It was a plank boardwalk bolted to the rock along the north bank, with houses on stilts leaning out over the water. By the 1920s something like thirty of them lined the walk, each with its own name, its own madam and its own front door. The madams owned their houses outright, paid the city’s monthly fines the way a shopkeeper pays a license fee, and ran what was, by the standards of a cannery town, the most orderly business on the waterfront.
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Then Alaska went dry in 1918, and the creek turned out to be the best thing about the address. Canadian liquor came up the Inside Passage in fishing boats, slipped under the boardwalk at high tide, and rose through trapdoors cut in the floors. When the marshal came in the front, the evidence went out the bottom. The tide carried it off and the salmon kept running.
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The arrangement lasted fifty-one years. In 1954 a territorial crackdown closed the last of the houses and the boardwalk went quiet. The town could have torn it down. Instead it kept it, restored it, hung interpretive signs along the rail that tell the story straight, and turned the best-known house into a museum. The town’s own signs make the joke about the fish and the fishermen both heading upstream. Ketchikan told it first.
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It moved the street out of sight in 1903 and put it on the map for good.
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Saturday: the woman at №24 who kept the house — and kept everything.
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09/28/2026

Before Ketchikan had a Creek Street, the creek had the town. 👀
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Part I of III — link in bio 👆
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Every summer for centuries, Tlingit families came to the mouth of a fast little creek on Revillagigedo Island to take salmon from a run so thick you could hear it. Their name for the place became the town’s. The town came later, and it came for the same fish.
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In the 1880s a saltery went up at the creek mouth, and in 1885 a cannery man named Mike Martin bought a piece of the shoreline from the Tlingit and stayed. The cannery followed, then the docks, then boardwalks nailed to the rock because there was no flat ground to build on. Ketchikan was incorporated in 1900 with Martin as its first mayor: a mile of waterfront hammered onto a mountainside, everything on pilings, everything wet. Steamships heading north made it their first Alaska stop, and “the First City” stuck.
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It was a working town — canneries, a sawmill, prospectors passing through, fishermen by the hundred and almost no families. Where a waterfront fills with single men and cannery wages, certain businesses arrive without being invited. By 1903 the new council had a problem it could no longer see past on Front Street, and a fast creek running right behind it.
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They didn’t shut anything down. They moved it.
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Wednesday: the street the town built on stilts and then swore it couldn’t see.
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09/26/2026

Do not open until 2968.
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Part III of III — link in bio 👆
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In 1968 Amarillo, by then billing itself the Helium Capital of the World, marked the hundredth anniversary of helium’s discovery with a six-story stainless steel monument. Then it filled the columns with 1968 and welded them shut.
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There are four columns, and each one is a time capsule: books, documents, films, seeds, office supplies, and one dehydrated apple pie. Once they were loaded, the caps were welded on and the contents sealed in a helium atmosphere. The gas does for paper what it did for airships. It refuses to react.
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The columns open on a schedule: 25, 50, 100, and 1,000 years. The first came open on time in 1993. The second opened in September 2018, was emptied, refilled by the town, and resealed until 2093. The third waits for 2068. The fourth waits for 2968.
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Inside that last one is a bank passbook showing a $10 deposit made in 1968. Depending on whose compounding you trust, it will be worth a quadrillion dollars or a quintillion, assuming the bank, the dollar, and Amarillo are all still in business.
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Even the monument has traveled. In 1982 a helicopter lifted all six stories from its original spot beside Interstate 40 and flew it across town to where it stands today. It also works as a sundial, in case anyone in 2968 needs the time.
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The Cadillacs took fifty years to vanish under spray paint. The bankbook has 942 to go. Amarillo is patient.
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Cars, gas, and a ten-dollar bet on the year 2968. The whole story is at the link in bio.
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