World War II was a time when many things were built out of necessity to defend the United States and to help the soldiers. Many of those structures have long since been taken down. Some just fell apart over time.
This is not the case with one structure on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The United States constructed a massive outdoor stairway across incredibly mountainous terrain in order to provide an access path for people to reach silos on top of the mountains. Those silos are no longer in use. Amazingly, the stairway has remained. It was intended to be a tourist attraction after the war.
Two problems prevented that from happening. The first was that the land the stairway crossed over was owned by private citizens in several areas. Those people did not want tourists walking across their land every day. The second problem was liability.
The stairway is incredibly narrow and steep in places. It is likely that many tourists would stand a high chance of actually falling off and rolling down the side of a mountain. The stairway was closed to the public. A guard was posted at the bottom although he is no longer there as of 2014.
Around a dozen people a day illegally scale the stairway. The Haiku Stairs rise up 2,800 feet over just 4,000 stairs. There are points where the stairs turn into ladders and go up vertically. A man named Samuel Norwack was latest person to go with friends up the stairway.
They left at 2 a.m. to arrive at the top just when the sun was rising. The view at the top looks down over the city and terrain below. He posted a video online of the entire trip along the stairs.
Haiku Stairs from Samuel Nowack on Vimeo.
