On the northwestern slopes of Haleakalā, the Makawao Forest Reserve was created in 1908 at the urging of Hawaiʻi’s first territorial forester Ralph Hosmer for the primary purpose of protecting freshwater resources to meet the increasing demand from the growing population and agricultural industries on Maui.

Hosmer wanted to counter the damage done through the mid-to-late 1800s, when logging, ranching and agriculture had chopped down large areas of land for crops, timber and grazing animals. The healthy forest would act like a sponge and capture rainwater that recharges the groundwater. But the loss of canopy caused severe erosion and disrupted the natural water cycles.

After some experimentation, Hosmer’s plan to quickly stabilize the watershed was planting fast-growing, non-native trees. Early management also included trying to create other timber resources that could supply local and export markets.

The 2,093-acre state reserve now is a lush, misty forest full of towering non-native trees — whose canopy provides shade and a natural setting for the public to enjoy the popular trails created for hikers, bikers and equestrians. It’s also popular for public hunting and forest collection.

But the “large-scale attempt to engineer nature” at Makawao and elsewhere in the state has contributed to the “alien-species crisis,” according to an article in “Nature and Society.”

To counter the damage done by previous reserve management and to deal with the tens of thousands of people who use it for recreation, the Hawaiʻi Division of Forestry and Wildlife is in the process of creating its first management plan for the Makawao Forest Reserve.

On April 16, the Department of Land and Natural Resources that oversees the Division of Forestry and Wildlife posted its 314-page draft management plan for the Makawao Forest Reserve.

Public feedback, which will be accepted through Friday, will help guide oversight over the next 10 years of the reserve, which is threatened by invasive plants, invasive animals, insects and disease, koa moth outbreaks, mosquitoes, koa wilt, fire and climate change, according to the draft.

The public can take a survey and/or provide public comment via email or by regular mail.

Two people who help with trail maintenance at the reserve, Raina Myers of the Sierra Club Maui Group and Aaron “Moose” Reichert who founded the Maui Mountain Bike Coalition, both say they were caught off guard about the draft management plan.

“I just thought that it would have been nice to have a little more community interaction around it and feedback, which I guess that’s what they’re doing now,” Myers said. “So I’m really hoping that they do take some of the feedback to heart.”

Lance De Silva, the state’s Maui branch forestry program manager, said there are 10 Maui Nui forest reserves and the state is simply ticking off document plans for the four that don’t have them. The Makawao Forest Reserve has been included as part of other larger landscape watershed planning processes and other state action plans.

Reichert is worried that the plan will push out the recreational activities that draw so many to the forest. In an Instagram video, he pleaded: “This is an urgent matter where we need your help. … The DLNR is doing a 10-year management on Makawao Forest and what I read is they’re going to lean more into the conservation and less into the recreational sports.”

Reichert said as he “sifted through the document, it’s all conservancy and dealing with the invasive species, which is needed with the watershed, but there’s not much mentioned in the plan about recreation.”

De Silva said recreation and hunting access is not being changed in the draft plan, with a “good balance” between the public’s use and conservation.

“Makawao Forest Reserve is a heavily recreated place, so we’re not shutting down any of that,” he said. “We plan to try to manage both the conservation side, ecological side, as well as the recreation side.”

The Makawao Forest Reserve is one of 55 forest reserves encompassing about 684,000 acres that is managed by the state.

A 2024 DLNR report to the State Legislature regarding its Nā Ala Hele Trail and Access Program said the Kahakapao Recreation Area of the reserve had 37,339 visits for a daily average of 102 people.

With all of the visitors to the area, De Silva said a management plan “really guides us to stay on track” in taking care of the place.

“For myself as a manager, if we’re doing something over years I will go back through these documents and say: ‘Hey, invasive species department, have we been doing this?'” he said. “It’s kind of like a gauge. Have we been doing this for critical habitat? Have we been doing this for recreation?”

In the draft plan, “Access, Trails and Other Public Uses” is one of the nine priority categories. It calls for maintaining public access to the forest reserve, maintaining infrastructure management and assessing the construction of new trails and rest stations in the recreation area.

Some action items include $75,000 per year to maintain biking trails in accordance with International Mountain Biking Association standards and workshops for the biking community, $25,000 per year for other trail maintenance, trail infrastructure and access-related infrastructure, $85,000 to complete a capacity study for trail and reserve use, and $75,000 per year for new trail construction.

De Silva said the state is working on capacity studies for many of its reserves to determine if managing the number of people will be necessary for both the protection of natural resources and the “social side” — when a trail gets too crowded for people to enjoy.

“One of the major, major things that has been an issue for us is that they’ve removed the port-a-potties from all of the park systems because they were getting vandalized a bunch of times,” said Myers, who is the grant-funded trail maintenance volunteer coordinator with the Sierra Club Maui Group. “They’ve refused to bring them back. The Sierra Club would love to like do a volunteer day and like dig a pit toilet like we’ve done in Haleakalā National Park.

“There’s a lot of like park users who need access to bathrooms, like when we’re doing trail days up there for hours, and people are just going off trail. I don’t think that’s very sustainable.”

De Silva said the vandalism of port-a-potties — including flipping, spray painting and smashing them with a hammer — “got to the point where no company wants to rent or service our port-a-potties.”

He added that most forest reserves don’t have any kind of amenities for that kind of stuff. “We’re not the national park,” he said.

Hunting in the draft plan remains as it is now, the state’s Unit D, with feral pigs as the primary game, and axis deer also present. Despite the presence of game birds, hunting them remains prohibited in the reserve.

Hunting is not allowed in the Kahakapao Recreational Area, which is proposed to be designated as a hunting safety zone during the next revision to the Hunting Rules.

There is one primary public access point into the reserve at the end of Kahakapao Road, where there are two parking areas: one for the Kahakapao Recreational Area and one for hunters. De Silva said the primary reason is to separate the hunting dogs from the pedestrians and hikers who bring their pets.

Jonathan Price, the associate chair for the Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, said he has not read the draft management plan but is knowledgeable about the Makawao Forest Reserve, “which is not your run-of-the-mill reserve.”

“It is in an ecological zone that we refer to as the mesic zone, or mesic forest, which is sort of an intermediate amount of rainfall,” he said. “It’s not too wet. It’s not too dry, and it’s at some modest elevation, of course. It’s up the mountain, but not super high up, and historically, these forests were what I would describe as a Goldilocks Zone, a very benevolent climate.”

The reserve ranges from 2,000 feet at the bottom of the northwest section to 4,900 feet at the summit, with an average air temperatures from 57° to 66°F.

The reserve receives an annual rainfall average of between 90 to 150 inches, with some of this precipitation contributing to the recharge of the Ha‘ikū aquifer. It also features four perennial tributaries of Māliko Stream flowing down gulches that either run through the forest reserve or along the reserve boundary.

“It accommodates some species that we might find in wet forests, some species that we might find in drier forests,” Price said. “These really are hotspots for biodiversity in general, and especially for trees and shrubs.”

Two centuries ago, the area was home to native trees, including koa, ōhi‘a and ‘iliahi (sandalwood).

But the once-thriving mesic native ecosystem has been severely degraded, first by the demolition of parts of the forest for growing crops and grazing ranch animals, and now by invasive species.

But the good news, according to Price and the draft management plan, is that remnants of the diverse mesic forest exist, primarily in the gullies where bulldozers and men with axes had trouble reaching.

“But they really are just remnants,” Price said.

He said the forest reserves have served different purposes over time.

“That particular forest reserve was a place where there were a lot of somewhat experimental outplantings of a lot of trees for various forestry purposes,” Price said. “So, of course, a lot of it is eucalyptus plantations. There are pines. There’s the quinine tree, which was originally a source of medicine used in treatment of malaria.

“They were trying all kinds of things in the earlier part of the 20th century. None of them have really panned out for those purposes.”

The Makawao Forest Reserve did not open to the public until 1997. The first trails for hikers, bikers and equestrians were not created until six years laters, when volunteers worked alongside the state’s Nā Ala Hele Trails and Access Program.

They made the flagship, nearly 6-mile Kahakapao Loop Trail, followed by a series of bike-only tracks, of which Reichert and others in the community volunteered their labor. It was the first public bicycle recreational area of its kind in the state.

“I remember going there 20 or more years ago, and you wouldn’t see very many people,” Price said. “There were a few trails. There were a few roads. But it wasn’t a place that was on people’s radar. And now it’s become kind of a community resource.”

He said most people wouldn’t know that in the gulches are the remnants of the diverse native mesic forest, with a number of discoveries made there over the years, including two new species of lobelioid around the year 2000 when he was in graduate school.

“They both would be described by the Hawaiian name hāhā, which sounds like a funny plant, but it’s actually really impressive,” Price said. The plant is listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Part of the draft plan is to protect the watershed by maintaining forest cover, reducing and preventing erosion, and adapting to climate change.

Despite the dominance of non-native trees, native species are present in the forest. They include native forest bird species ʻalauahio and ‘amakihi, and one native migratory species, kōlea. There are 19 species in the reserve for birdwatchers.

Native plants that are present in the reserve include māmaki, maile and ‘ie‘ie, which grow in patches along the trail’s edge. Endangered hala pepe trees cling to the cliffs of the gulches, where giant hāpu‘u ʻiʻi or Hawaiian treeferns unfurl. In the undergrowth hide tiny native snails and spiders.

An especially beautiful section of the forest goes through a sea of native kupukupu ferns underneath tropical ash trees.

Price said with a good management plan there is the possibility to bring back some of the Makawao Forest. The draft plan said the reserve remains a high-priority restoration site for the state due to the presence of the remnant native vegetation and viable seedbanks that provide a foundation for recovery.

“They’re going to start with those remnants that are in reasonably good shape and build out from there,” Price said.

Another positive is the reserve’s accessibility by the trail system and the four-wheel drive roads, unlike some remote reserves.

“When you’re trying to build a forest back, it takes a lot of effort,” Price said. “This is not a helicopter operation… Being able to get work crews and volunteers from the public in there is an advantage.”

Restoring native ecosystems in the Makawao Forest Reserve also will contribute to the overall Maui Nui Landscape Conservation Plan. Currently, the state and 18 other government and nonprofit partners are developing a comprehensive strategy for conserving biodiversity across the islands of Maui, Lānaʻi, Molokaʻi and Kahoʻolawe, with a goal to protect more than 416 species at risk of extinction.

Six endangered wildlife species that are protected by state and federal regulations have been documented to occur in the Makawao Forest Reserve, although only four are believed to still exist: the ‘ōpe‘ape‘a or Hawaiian hoary bat, the nēnē or Hawaiian goose, the ‘ua‘u or Hawaiian petrel, and the ʻaʻo or Newell’s shearwater.

The plan addresses fire mitigation and management, with the state having its own wildland program.

“I always tell people it’s a unique opportunity because not too many land managers have fire departments and not many fire departments are land managers,” De Silva said.

Maui County’s Pi‘iholo Water Treatment Facility, which is completely fenced off and closed to the public, is in the northwest corner of the reserve. The Kula Water Pipeline also runs through the reserve, transporting water from Hāna to the rest of East Maui.

Commercial activity in the reserve, including obtaining film industry permits, is looked at on a case-by-case basis, DeSilva said.

“We have to make sure that filming doesn’t impede on natural resources, doesn’t impede on the public,” he said. “We won’t have a huge bonfire in the middle of Makawao Forest Reserve, even if Tom Cruise wanted to shoot a movie there.”

The new plan will guide the state in creating regulations, supports efforts to secure funding for identified objectives, prioritizes the implementation of the objectives, soliciting requests for proposals or bids to do the objectives and informs the public about the short- and long-term goals. Much of the funding for the reserve is through federal and other types of grants.

For more information and to see the draft, click here. Community members also can take a survey and submit comments to be included as part of the planning process. Written questions or comments may also be submitted via email at forestry@hawaii.gov  or by letter postmarked no later than Friday, May 8, and sent to: Forestry Program Manager, 1151 Punchbowl Street, Room 325, Honolulu, HI 96813.

Once the plan is finalized, it will be submitted for review and approval by the Board of Land and Natural Resources.