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Haiku Stairs (Stairway to Heaven), Hawaii
That heart-stopping trail has nearly 4,000 metal steps climbing straight up a mountain ridge in Oahu.
Built in 1942 after Pearl Harbor, the Haiku Stairs weren’t meant for hikers at all. What started as a wartime rush job became one of Hawaii’s most breathtaking paths that’s now illegal to climb.
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It Was Originally a Military Radio Site
The Haiku Stairs were built in 1942 by the US Navy after Pearl Harbor. Two men, Bill Adams and Louis Otto, took just 21 days to stake out the path by pounding iron spikes into the cliff face. The Navy built the stairs to reach a top-secret radio station that could send signals to subs as far away as Tokyo Bay…