Waianapanapa Black Sand Beach

"https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/149398685535135/honokalani-black-sand-beach/ Highlights The most easily accessible black sand beach on Maui Please don't take any of the sand Water tends to be rough–most will just admire the view Just past mile marker 32 is the road to Wai‘anapanapa Park. (Gee, that really rolls off the tongue, huh? Blew a gasket in the old spell-checker on that one. It sounds like why-a-nah-pah nah-pah.) The park is clean and well maintained. They even have cabins for rent. Other facilities include restrooms, showers, picnic tables and camping. Its main draw? It has a volcanic black sand beach. Wai‘anapanapa State Park has the only volcanic black sand beach (created from a lava flow) on Maui. The only thing difficult about this park is pronouncing its name. If you’ve heard of volcanic black sand beaches, you may have thought they were all on the Big Island. Au contraire. Pa‘iloa Beach here at Wai‘anapanapa Park is 100 or so feet wide and attests to the newness of the land here. The beach was formed when lava flowed and fountained into the sea near here, shattering on contact with the ocean. Fragments smashed against each other and formed the sand you see. (Don’t believe books that tell you that the beach was formed by cliff erosion.) Maybe Rome wasn’t built in a day, but this beach may have been, because these types of beaches are often formed in days or weeks. We’ve watched black sand beaches being created on the Big Island, and it’s an awesome sight. They usually have a short life span since the source of the sand stops as soon as the lava stops flowing. Usually within a few hundred to a thousand years they vanish as the ocean gradually sweeps away the precious sand. (White sand beaches have organic sources like coral and shells, which are renewed.) Occasionally the sand is deposited in a perfectly shaped bay like this one, which allows it to stay a little longer. Some lava flows nearby are only 500 years old, according to a dated sample taken a mile south of here. There’s a pretty coastal hike that leads to the source of all this sand. It's described here. Older islands like Kaua‘i and O‘ahu have no volcanic black sand beaches. (They can sometimes have the other type of black sand beach, like the one at Hana Bay, created when water chips off flecks of lava from stream beds and piles them up onshore.) Since the sand supply here is finite, please try to refrain from taking samples back home with you, except the stowaways lodged in your bathing suit. Don’t swim during high surf because currents can form in the bay. If you read somewhere about the spring-fed freshwater caves here, forget about it. In 2017 a visitor decided to do some underwater cave exploring, using a cellphone in a plastic bag as his light source. Tragically, he drowned, and the state responded not only by closing the caves off to swimming, but also by erecting barriers so you can't even look at the caves. They also posted a "Falling Rocks" sign to imply that it's dangerous to even approach the caves. How Crowded Not usually too crowded (on weekdays) How's the access Pretty easy access with short walk Parking Not easy to come by"