Bloody Ridge — known to the Marines who held it as Edson's Ridge, and on staff maps as the Lunga Ridge — runs south from the inland edge of Henderson Field. In September 1942, with the Marines on the airfield outnumbered and short of everything, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson dug his Raider battalion in along this low spine of grassland. The Japanese hurled three regiments at the position over successive nights. The Marines bent but did not break, and the Japanese never came that close to retaking the airstrip again.
The ridge today is much as it was: open grass with patches of bush, the airfield visible to the north, the interior mountains rising behind. A small monument near the top — easy to miss if you don't have a guide — lists the units that fought here. The walk along the crest is short and the view explains, better than any caption, why the Japanese kept charging the same hill: from these few metres of elevation you can see everything that matters on the coastal plain.