Waiale Falls and surrounds

One fun side effect of getting a drone and wanting simply to get out and fly with it in the beginning has been exploring and finding places relatively nearby that I hadn't been to or didn't know about before. One such place is Waiale Falls on the Wailuku River, just on the outskirts of Hilo. There's a bridge which crosses the river just below the falls, offering a nice vantage point, and it's actually more than just a single waterfall, as the topography makes for some interesting and complicated confluences and meanderings of waterways. Since it's only about 10 minutes from my house (while offering some relative solitude for practicing drone pilots), I've gone there a number of times both to take photos and practice my flying.

There are actually two main waterfalls in quick succession along the Wailuku river, two streams which join with it in the space of a few dozen meters, and an area where water splits off above the top waterfall only to meander around and join with the river again. In the image from Google Maps below, the road (Waiānuenue Avenue) crosses the Wailuku near the center-bottom of the image. To its left you can see the lower falls, then there's an island in the river and the upper falls, plus the Kapehu and Nakakauila Streams which join the river.

However, while the overhead view is useful if you know what you're looking at, a nice drone shot can be a lot more immediately understandable:

Here's a shot of the same area (looking roughly south-west), though with the lower falls hidden behind trees. It's hard to see, but the area where the cars are parked in the center is actually an island itself, as a stream splits off from just above the upper falls and meander down around below the bridge in the foreground, only to join the river again below the bridge below the lower falls. It's tricky to see because of trees, but here's a shot showing the area around the upper falls:

Despite what it might look like, the two pools of water here are not connected: there's a spur of rock that separates them (behind the foreground tree), letting the waters of the main river continue on the left while splitting those on the right off to meander around before rejoining the river. It's a really interesting formation and one that I suspect isn't particularly common!

Here's a shot showing the two falls and the area between them with a sort of gravel-bar island a bit better (the bridge is just out of shot to the bottom):

The lower fall clearly has some man-made construction going on, though I don't know the details. Incidentally, the name Waiale comes from the words wai and ʻale, meaning “rippling water,” so I suspect the pond's been there since before anything was done to the lower fall. There are some (rough, unnofficial) trails in the area which let you walk up to that area, and I've seen people swimming around the island. When the river's low like in the photos it's probably not too bad, but the Wailuku is the single most dangerous river in the state, responsible for something like 30% of river drowning deaths annually, so I wouldn't exactly advise it unless you really know what you're doing. When it rains the water flow of the river can increase by something like a hundred times over what it looks like in these photos in a very short span of time, so you definitely don't want to get caught in a flash flood. (In fact, the name of the river, Wailuku, translates roughly to “waters of destruction.”)

Here's one final photo of the lower falls, taken from below the level of the bridge just above the water to give a perspective on its power even in its relatively low-flow state:

(These photos were taken on different days, which is why the lighting conditions differ so much between them.) All in all, I enjoy this area (which I hadn't visited prior to June), and it makes a conveniently-nearby place to go relax and fly after work if I want something more interesting than houses in Hilo to look at. It's started raining more again lately as we come into the wet season here, so I'm hoping to catch it soon in a higher-flow state to compare with these photos. I might even put together a video if I can get enough good clips.

On a related note, my family will be visiting for a week over Thanksgiving and I'm looking forward to getting photos of the various places we visit, so I'll probably have a raft of new exciting photos to share before long. It'll probably take a bit of time to sort through everything and post them, but I should have some great new stuff to share in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving! A hui hou!