Hiking the East Sleeping Giant Trail (Nounou) on Kauaʻi
In loving memory of Fiona Choi. The girl in the cover photo above.
Distance: 3.8 miles / 6.1 km
Elevation Gain: ~1,000 ft. / 305 m
The Sleeping Giant Trail is a popular sunrise hike among locals and visitors alike. I personally love sunrise on Nounou because the trail gets much busier and hotter by midday.
East vs. West Sleeping Giant Trail (Nounou)
If you’re trying to decide which trail is right for, I hope this clears things up.
The East Sleeping Giant Trail is the harder of the two trailheads to hike Nounou. It’s longer, there’s more elevation gain, and there’s one additional area that requires some scrambling/ climbing that the west trailhead doesn’t have.
However, the West Sleeping Giant Trail will almost always be muddier after the area has rained recently. Even still, I like the West Nounou Trail more because I personally think it’s prettier.
East Sleeping Giant Trailhead Parking
Parking for the East Sleeping Giant Trail is in a small parking lot off of Haleilio Road just outside of the trailhead.
By midday, the parking lot can get very full as you can see in the photos below.
Google Maps Directions: East Sleeping Giant Trailhead
Hiking the East Sleeping Giant Trail
The East Sleeping Giant Trail begins up a series of 23 switchbacks, give or take, to get to the Nounou Ridge that leads up to the summit.
However, don’t let the number of switchbacks make you think that the east trail is significantly more difficult. Some are very short while others are more what you’d expect a switchback to be.
These are the first views of the summit.
Go right when you come to this section in the photos below.
This scrambling section in the next four photos is the most difficult part of the east trail side. However, there’s more than enough places to grab and step if you take it slow.
East-West Sleeping Giant Junction
Eventually, the east trail meets up with the trail coming up from the west side. Go left at this split to reach Nounou.
This shelter should be shortly after the junction, and it’s a good indicator if you’re in the right direction or not.
The trail continues straight across the open clearing in the photo above.
The sections ahead also require some scrambling to make it up the trail, but as long as you take your time, there are plenty of good points of contact to do it safely.
Sunrise on Nounou
Sunrise on Sleeping Giant is actually better on the ridge line leading up to the summit than the summit itself which has a better view to the west than the east.
Puʻu Nounou
The Sleeping Giant summit is about 1,241 ft. (378 m).
The trail makes for such a great east Kauaʻi sunrise hike because there’s nothing else obstructing the view on nearly every side of the mountain!
Native Plants on the Sleeping Giant Trail
Since Sleeping Giant is such a low-elevation mountain filled with invasive species, there isn’t a lot in terms of native plants on the trail. The only ones that I noticed on the hike up were ʻUhaloa and ʻAʻaliʻi.
While there are better trails to see more native Hawaiian plants, you can check out my separate post below to learn more about these and other species from different areas and trails from across the islands. I wrote this post to help others ID plants while adventuring around Hawaiʻi.
Read My Separate Post: Native Hawaiian Plant Guide
