While hiking Kauai’s Napali Coast, BYU-Hawaii student and cross country team member, Malacie Jorgensen, said she met hippies who lived off the land and learned how to prepare food and supplies for a five-day hike over President’s Day weekend.
She hiked with four friends along the mountainous trail and at the turnaround point of the hike, she said they met “some hippies.” At the end of the Napali Coast is a beach only accessible by hiking, helicopter, or boat.
Jorgensen said the night they got there, the hippies caught a goat and made burgers out of it. She said they find ways to survive while waiting for supplies to arrive by boat.
“They’re just fun and super cool people to talk to,” Jorgenson said, adding she could live like them “for a week, but I would want to have a purpose to my life.”
Jorgensen said she and her friends carried 50-pound backpacks and hiked 22 miles over five days. She is an exercise and sports sciences major from Orem, Utah, finishing out her sophomore year at BYUH.
Describing the scene at the end of the trial, she said, “When you get to the beach, there is a ton of sand and it is just super, super soft. The sand on Oahu doesn’t compare to how soft the sand is there, and the shore break is super nice so you can play in the water.
"There is probably 100 yards of camping area and then all the sudden, it is just straight-up mountainside [with] a waterfall that is probably 75-feet high.” Lindi Young, an EXS major and junior from Kansas who also was on the trip, said, “The sand is super soft, and it’s black... with green mixed into it.”
In addition to the beach, mountains, and waterfalls, the people the hiking party came across were mostly naked. “They don’t give a care about how they look... They’re free,” said Jorgenson. She said everyone on the trail was friendly and easygoing about life. There was even one guy she meet who hiked the trail thinking he was going to do a five-day hike, but he has been there for six months.
Jorgenson added, “It is a completely different vibe there. Everyone is just so hippie, so easygoing about life there.” In order to make this kind of hike happen, Jorgensen said she had to make sure they had enough food to get them through.
" It was tricky, she said, because they had to bring everything they needed, including a stove. However, she said they ended up with more than enough food. The first day they ate perishable food and saved the things that wouldn’t go bad for the rest of the trip.
The group ate their meat and fresh fruit first before consuming their oatmeal, dried fruit and jerky. Jorgenson said planning what to bring for food was a challenge. “You even have to plan for your trash.”
For water, they would get it from the stream as they hiked and use water purification tablets. “It was annoying that you would have to wait a half hour to an hour before you could drink it, because you were just dying. But then after it was good.”
The hiking trial was full of switch backs, said Jorgensen. “You’ll go into the mountain side then pull out where you’ll see a beautiful view of coastline. Then you’ll go in the mountain again and come out, but everything about it is super pretty-super green.”
There are two 400-foot waterfalls on the hike: one two miles in and one six miles in. The one six miles in, she said, “is by far my favorite waterfall on the whole entire planet right now.”
“I have been on a lot of hikes, but this is probably my favorite,” Jorgenson concluded.