Fifteen miles east of Honolulu lies the most breathtaking staircase in the world. These particular stairs weave through lush vegetation on a three-foot perch with dizzying thousand-foot drops on either side. The ridge lines are like complex origami with the stairs traversing the folds in the earth. More than once the stairs morph into ladders to accommodate the sheer verticality of the terrain. They are rusted, but sturdy. The stairs delight and terrify at that same time, while they climb into the clouds, earning their online nickname “Stairway to Heaven.”

Despite the jaw dropping views, you won’t find these stairs on any Hawaii tourist brochures. These stairs were constructed under duress to reach a top secret Navy satellite outpost that was critical to America’s WWII effort in the Pacific. The Haiku Stairs, so called for the valley they overlook, are the last remnants of what was, at the time, the Hoover Dam of antennas. The Navy, fresh off cracking the Japanese communications code, was desperate to transmit its messages across the Pacific fleet, including to underwater submarines, which they hoped would reach as far as Tokyo Bay.

The state of the art at the time was to build two large towers and string the antenna cables between them. But this was to be a Pacific-sized amp, the most powerful transmitter ever made, and engineers couldn’t build a tower big enough. They needed a mountain. A very particular mountain.

It turns out the same topography that hikers have long risked $1,000 fines to ascend also made the Haiku Valley the perfect centerpiece for a century-defining communications system. Near vertical aspects stretching almost 3,000 feet served as ideal poles. That they swept a 180 degree horseshoe meant there were two of them. The valley floor below, meanwhile, was well situated to house the gigantic 200kW, four-coil transmitter that powered the system and had to be within cable reach of the antennae suspended above. Unattenuated views over the adjacent, flat Pacific are as epic for people as they are useful for radio waves.

And so the Navy got to work, building at extreme speed, and in extreme secrecy. Three months later, the crux of the system was complete, and over time various structures sprang up around the valley and surrounding walls. The stairs, in particular, snaked up the spine of the southern ridge, allowing Navy personnel access to a control room at the peak. After the war, the site became one of the original nodes in the global Omega network, the earth-based precursor to GPS. When satellite GPS launched, the radio was decommissioned, setting the stage for the stairs to become the main attraction.

A season one episode of Magnum PI in which Magnum carried his buddy piggyback up the stairs brought them national attention. Soon after the stairs became a word-of-mouth destination for adventurous hikers. In the late 1980s the stairs were closed to the public due to rights and ownership issues, but an informal truce developed between hikers and the authorities tasked with keeping them off the stairs and “safe”.

But after decades of simmering conflict, things came to a head this summer. The City of Honolulu, under pressure from a few agitated neighbors, began dismantling the stairs, though a last minute lawsuit from a non-profit group has temporarily halted the removal.

Fearing that the Haiku Stairs’ days were numbered, we went to explore them — first accessing the peak via a legal trail on the backside of the mountain, then slowly picking our way down the stairs. In doing so, we discovered something far more meaningful than a trail too good for public consumption: a staggering marriage of natural beauty and technical infrastructure that told a forgotten story of American might and ambition.

The case against the stairs is two-fold: they’re dangerous, and trespassers blight the neighborhood. Superficially, this doesn’t seem crazy. Up close, they flout any sense of safety or modern construction standards. Some sections, especially towards the bottom, are missing railings, and a few more show significant rust. Dozens of steps are loose or missing altogether.

Empirically, however, the danger angle is totally bunk — exactly one person in 80 years could legitimately claim “Perished on the Haiku Stairs” in his obituary, and that was from a heart attack. But for that asterisk, the Stairs’ safety record is spotless. At their height of popularity in the 1980s, an estimated 20 thousand hikers per year scurried over them, completely without incident.

“It’s a stairway. It’s got railings. You go up and you go down. If you use a minimum of common sense, you won’t get injured,” said Dr. Vernon Ansdell, a 10 time climber and proponent of saving the stairs, in a 2021 interview. Closing the stairs would leave only the back path we hacked through to access some of the best views in Hawaii. Take our word for it: the backside is much more dangerous.

The trespassing problem meanwhile, authorities brought on themselves. Once they started posting a security guard at the main entrance to the stairs, enterprising hikers blazed their own paths, many of which took them across local yards and over, under, or through private fences.

This was the route we had to take upon exiting the stairs. It was confusing, and after several wrong turns, we finally made our way to a public road where we promptly met a police car and were given a perfunctory lecture and a real warning. But those who are caught while trespassing have been issued $1,000 plus fines.

Following our conversation with Oahu’s finest, we took a straw poll of the residents in the Haiku Village and found them mostly supportive of the stairs, with one kind woman, in the Aloha spirit, even warning us of police in the neighborhood. We thanked her and smiled. Others we spoke with on Oahu, including active military personnel, overwhelmingly support the stairs.

If access is the main problem, solutions are straightforward. One of two desolate access roads that skirt the village and lead directly to the base of the stairs could be opened. Traffic could be throttled by implementing a permit system, which have been successfully used on Mount Whitney, Half Dome, and even Hawaii’s own Diamond Head. And if those layers are still insufficient, require guides. Charge a lot. More drastically, the National Parks Service could step in if the city would rather not bother. It could even be rife for a public-private partnership, such as the ones The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) have been advancing in the continental West.

With reasonable alternatives available, the incessant drive to remove the stairs is a head scratcher. Councilwoman Esther Kiaaina’s press conference to announce the removal likely reveals the real reason: politics. Why hold a big press conference to announce the removal of a beloved and historical institution? Supporters of the stairs say this is an agenda item for Kiaaina to win favor with a small, politically connected group of homeowners in the Haiku Village, who don’t like the increased traffic in their neighborhood. Kiaaina and the city council are set to waste significant taxpayer money to appease their friends in the Haiku Village. The budget to remove the stairs via helicopter is already 50% over initial estimates and will cost twice the amount to repair them, never mind the ongoing legal fees.

In the other corner is a motley coalition of passionate outdoors enthusiasts and history buffs led by Sean Pager, a law professor at Michigan State, who fell in love with the stairs after climbing them in the 1980s. According to Mr. Pager, the biggest problem is that they’ve been off limits for so long that people in Hawaii and the mainland don’t realize the City Council’s skullduggery.

The calf burner warnings on the AllTrails app and the stunning Instagram photos were enough for us to book plane tickets. But once in Hawaii we found a far more compelling historical story than we ever imagined. One could literally feel the anachronisms — we needed no convincing we were standing on a piece of infrastructure that played a starring role in World War II. But we also heard an all-too-common B plot of local politics gone awry.

If the Friends of the Haiku Stairs ultimately do succeed, the valley can continue to serve as a fitting bookend to nearby Pearl Harbor, which can be seen from the summit on days it isn’t blanketed by clouds. One serves as a reminder of a country caught flat-footed and unprepared. The other is symbolic of its heroic response: bending nature, the laws of physics, and human coordination on unprecedented scale in successful pursuit of an enemy whose defeat ushered in an American Century.

—Richard Dewey and Mike Gallo

Feature image: Shawn Clover