THE WILD PLACES OF KAUAI
By Ira Henry Freeman
Hawaii is not all high-rise hotels and beach-front condominiums. My wife, Beatrice, and I found a wilderness of mountains and forests, a canyon and sheer sea cliffs, in the interior and on the northwest coast of Kauai. This region is a haven for nature lovers, hikers, campers and bird-watchers. There is no golf, tennis, surfing or shopping. Trout fishing - as well as hunting of wild goats, wild pigs and pheasants - is permitted. But the principal activity is absorbing the beauty and solitude of a tropical wilderness. We spent one week of a recent month's tour of Hawaii on Kauai, the ''garden isle'' of the Hawaiian group, exploring this territory by car where possible, on foot where only trails existed, by helicopter where neither wheel nor boot could manuever. Kauai, the most northwesterly of the major islands, is 25 minutes by air from Honolulu. Like the other islands it is volcanic in origin, but all its volcanoes are extinct. Kauai is the oldest, wettest, greenest island and the most wooded; more than half its 350,000 acres are in forest.