“It’s like time travel, how the island looked decades ago before the restorations began.” That’s how the guide, Beno Atan, described this trek through a vast stretch of basketball-size lava rocks on the isolated north coast of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island as it was named by a Dutch navigator who sailed there on Easter Sunday 1722.
Just a few minutes into an eight-and-a-half-mile hike that takes you along a primordially rugged coastline, there already is a sense of deep isolation and separateness from the rest of the island.
You’re trekking under the shadow of the island’s highest peak, Maunga Terevaka, a 1,600-foot extinct volcano in a section of Rapa Nui National Park, a collection of protected areas that together make up a Unesco World Heritage site.
It’s an uninhabited, roadless and raw landscape that, Beno said, is essentially an open-air museum, filled with ancient structures and relics dating to the arrival of the first Polynesian navigators 1,700 years ago.
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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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