No road has ever crossed the Nā Pali Coast, and none ever will. Sixteen miles of fluted basalt run north from Polihale to Keʻe Beach, rising close to 4,000 feet, leaving three approaches only: the Kalalau Trail, the air above, and the water below.
The water is the oldest of them, and it is the route Na Pali Coast Raft Tours Hanalei crews inherited from voyagers who worked this shoreline in koa outriggers for close to a thousand years.
The cliffs were not empty. Nuʻalolo Kai, Miloliʻi and Kalalau Valley held terraced loʻi kalo fed by diverted streams; the families at Nuʻalolo Kai lowered supplies by rope ladder to the beach below and farmed the flat until the last of them left around 1919. Kalalau supported several hundred residents into the 1870s. Archaeologists have logged heiau platforms, house sites and stone-walled terraces across all three valleys, most of them legible from the sea as pale geometry in the green.
Protection came late. The Nā Pali Coast State Wilderness Park now covers 6,175 acres, and a marine life conservation district shields the reef at Nuʻalolo Kai. Rainfall does the sculpting: Waiʻaleʻale, thirty miles inland, takes more than 400 inches a year, and that water leaves the island as the waterfalls and hanging valleys that give the coast its scalloped profile. Na Pali Coast Raft Tours Hanalei tours pass beneath those falls and into lava tubes such as Waiahuakua, a double-mouthed sea cave with a waterfall inside it. Spinner dolphins hold in the lee; humpbacks pass between December and April.
Hanalei Bay, two miles of crescent sand backed by taro fields and the Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge, has been the staging ground since the first commercial Hanalei boat tours began running the coast in the 1970s. Kauaʻi North Shore sightseeing has since spread to the air, but the sea remains the closest reading. A Na Pali Coast Raft Tours Hanalei tour is, finally, an encounter with five million years of erosion held in a wall within arm's reach.
4 hr
