Fifteen miles east of Honolulu lies the most breathtaking staircase in the world. These particular stairs weave through lush vegetation on a three-foot perch with dizzying thousand-foot drops on either side. The ridge lines are like complex origami with the stairs traversing the folds in the earth. More than once the stairs morph into ladders to accommodate the sheer verticality of the terrain. They are rusted, but sturdy. The stairs delight and terrify at that same time, while they climb into the clouds, earning their online nickname “Stairway to Heaven.”

Despite the jaw dropping views, you won’t find these stairs on any Hawaii tourist brochures. These stairs were constructed under duress to reach a top secret Navy satellite outpost that was critical to America’s WWII effort in the Pacific. The Haiku Stairs, so called for the valley they overlook, are the last remnants of what was, at the time, the Hoover Dam of antennas. The Navy, fresh off cracking the Japanese communications code, was desperate to transmit its messages across the Pacific fleet, including to underwater submarines, which they hoped would reach as far as Tokyo Bay.

The state of the art at the time was to build two large towers and string the antenna cables between them. But this was to be a Pacific-sized amp, the most powerful transmitter ever made, and engineers couldn’t build a tower big enough. They needed a mountain. A very particular mountain.