Finding the lost explosives along the Solomon Islands' Maruyama trail
In brief
An 80-year old jungle track created by Japanese troops through Guadacanal still contains many hidden dangers. HALO teams are working to uncover them.
A little over 1000 miles northeast of Australia are the coral atolls, volcanic mountain ranges and tropical rainforests of the Solomon Islands. The country is a remote archipelago of over 900 islands, spanning 900 miles of the South Pacific.
Solomon Islanders live in constant fear of the remnants of war that surround them.
Children play with the explosives found in bullets, making improvised fireworks for Christmas and New Year's celebrations. Grenades are sometimes kept in homes as keepsakes; people mistakenly assuming that they are no longer dangerous.
Living among bombs is part of everyday life for many.
In 2024, an abandoned stockpile of over 200 projectiles was uncovered at a school in the capital of Honiara while digging a hole for sewage.
In 2025, a subsurface bomb exploded under a fire of burning rubbish on a busy roadside. Since records began in 2011, the police have destroyed over 60,000 items of unexploded ordnance reported by the public.
This represents only a fraction of the problem.
The Maruyama Trail
An 80-year old jungle track spanning 15-miles in Guadalcanal reveals a major key in the story of how Solomon Islands became contaminated with these remnants of war.
The trail, known as the Maruyama Trail, was once walked in secret under the cover of the thick jungle canopy by 7,000 Japanese soldiers, on the way to meet a deafening defeat against the US Forces.
Today, the jungle reclaimed large parts of the trail. However, clues remain that can help to piece together the soldiers' journey.
Abandoned military supplies, found by local communities hunting and gathering in the jungle, provide an indication of the exact path of the lost footsteps of the Japanese.
The fight for Henderson Field
Much of unexploded bombs are found on Guadalcanal, where the Japanese and US Allies vied for control over Henderson Field, now the capital’s international airport.
Planning a surprise attack against the Americans, Japanese Forces needed to advance undetected through the trail.
Japanese engineers began hacking a trail now known as the 'Maruyama Trail', covering a 15-mile stretch from the West of Honiara, now the capital city, to the grassy ridges south of the airstrip.
Over 7,000 soldiers, under Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama, the namesake of the trail, set off on their jungle march. Each soldier carried just over a week's supply of food, ammunition, and an artillery shell.
The road of white bones
The winding and difficult trek took the Japanese troops far longer than initially anticipated. Food supplies began to dwindle, and malaria and dysentery ran rife among the exhausted and malnourished troops.
They were forced to drop their ammunition along the way, unable to carry their heavy load through the jungle. Artillery and cannons, which had to be disassembled and transported on foot, were thrown away.
In the end, the attack was carried out largely with rifles alone. The Japanese troops suffered a devastating defeat, where just 1,000 of the initial 7,000 retreated down the Maruyama Trail.
A Japanese account states that during the retreat, the trail was nicknamed "white bone road."
Our mission
Eighty years later, survey teams at The HALO Trust are finally hunting down this abandoned ordnance to piece together the location of this trail.
My father told me to be afraid of the bombs in the bush from the war.
But we need the bush cleared and made safe. Future generations need space to grow food and build houses and we have a growing population. We need to be able to move around the bush safely.
Combining archival research, police records, community liaison and field observation, HALO's survey teams are building a picture of the scale and extent of the unexploded ordnance contamination across the Solomon Islands.
Each item found is a clue about how to make the Solomon Islands safer. This is a necessary first step to disposing of these weapons – for good.
If explosives are cleared from this trail, we'll create opportunities for the country and our people in the tourism industry and farming.
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