Is the Alakai Swamp actually a swamp?

When I first encountered the Alakai "swamp," having slithered though, tromped through, PBR'ed through swamps from Viet Nam to Florida to Costa Rica, I wondered why it was called a swamp.

Certainly it didn't seem to me to be a swamp, not in the same sense that the Everglades are. Or vast area of Viet Nam's U Minh forest. Or the great Dismal. If it doesn't rain for a week, they don't dry up like the Alakai. Look at the topos. Nowhere in the Alakai is a drainage more than a hundred yards away.

Is it the highest swamp on the earth? Well, it resembles the Cascades, large sections of Costa Rica, Mountains of the Moon in Arica, areas just as wet and higher. They're just as soggy ( only the summit gets the 360 inches a year. The Alakai Swamp Trail is closer to 100's of inches a year.

So I go with the name Alakai but if you want to call it a swamp, I promise not to flame you.

My dictionary defines swamp as:

a. A seasonally flooded bottomland with more woody plants than a marsh and better drainage than a bog.
b. A lowland region saturated with water.

Here's a couple of the many blurbs from scientists.

...Alakai (ah lah kah’ ee) Swamp, which, by the way, has been misnamed, as it does not meet all of the conditions for being a swamp. Alternately, the Alakai Swamp has been described as the world’s highest bog (elevation 4,000 feet), but, depending on your definition, may not be a bog either (no peat present because no sphagnum moss)...

...The misnamed Alaka'i Swamp is actually a wet montane plateau mostly above 1000 m elevation spreading northwest from Mt. Wai'ale'ale ... The plateau is deeply dissected by numerous forested ravines or canyons that feed into highly eroded Waimea Canyon, which drains to the south. The ridges between the stream can be broad and nearly flat, pocked in many places by open bogs (probably the origin of the "swamp" designatiion).

There are No snakes in Hawaii!

What about Waialeale being the "wettest spot on earth."

We do not know this. We could not know this since only a few spots on the earth have raingages and most are placed in towns, at airports, etc. There are other contenders in India but they fail the logic test just as Waialeale does. (And even if Waialeale were the wettest, since nobody lives there, is it important. Wouldn't the wettest inhabited locale be more interesting, and the other contenders are inhabited.)

Most "non-purple prose" sites, articles, magazines, newpapers, add a qualifier such as "known," "reputed," "one of the," so forth.

Visit a few rainfall sites and you'll discover that there are vast regions wetter than Hawaii (excluding orographic rains.) Many are over water, in remote mountain ranges, etc. How can we claim to "Know" Waialeale has greater orographic rains than some windy ridge in the mountains of New Guinea. Or Costa Rica. Or Maui. Or India. We can't, especially when one considers that in the first place, the Waialeale raingage was placed haphazardly over a hundred years ago.

Logically, there are hundreds, even thousands of spots with greater rainfall.

Is Waialeale the wettest spot on Kauai? Could be. No evidence or logic to support this claim. Kawaikini could be wetter. It could be wetter a quarter mile east and two thousand feet lower in the Blue Hole. Namolokama Mountain could be wetter.

Is Waialeale is the wettest spot in Hawaii? Some hydrologists have argued that there are wetter spots in the Koolaus and near Puu Kukui on Maui.

So, add a qualifier please. But if you don't, I won't flame you.