AngularJS ui-router navigating from controller with url: *path

I have a hierarchy loaded from rest service, that contains site tree. Each tree item has a FriendlyUrl property, which should tells angularjs what content to display for specific URLs. Since url data is dynamic, I configured a single route xin my application:

 .state('default', {
        templateUrl: 'm/templates/app.html',
        url: '/*path',
        resolve: {
                FriendlyUrl:
                ['$stateParams'
                function ($stateParams) {
                    var path = $stateParams.path;
                }],              
        },
        controller: 'appCtrl',
    })

Then in my appCtrl controller, I check for injected FriendlyUrl and display appropriate data in appropriate places. The actual code is slightly bigger, but I stripped some code for readability.

I have a problem when I try to navigate to a different url. When a user clicks on a certain anchor, I would like to navigate to a different url within the same application to load different content.

I tried using

 $state.go('default', {
            path: 'about-us'
        }, {
            location: true,
            inherit: false
        });

but when I execute the above code several times I get: /#/about-usabout-usabout-us

Also, I cannot use '/' symbol, when I replace '-' with '/' the execution completes without navigating and without any errors.

I would like to be able to navigate to hash urls like this for example:

/#/company/about-us/contacts