Mauka · the plain
The wind plain of Kaʻū.
Behind Ka Lae stretches the open plain of Kamāʻoa — wind-scoured, treeless, dotted with the remains of pre-contact agricultural mounds. This is some of the windiest land on Hawaiʻi Island; a small wind farm uses what could not, by 19th-century efforts, be coaxed into commercial-scale farming.
Mid · Kalalea Heiau
Kalalea Heiau and the fishing canoes.
Kalalea Heiau stands a short walk inland from the cliffs. It was a fisherman's heiau — small, low, oriented to the deep blue water just offshore. The land here was working land, not ceremonial; the heiau served the men who launched canoes into a current that runs straight to the open Pacific.
Open this section in the map →Coast · the cliffs of Ka Lae
Ka Lae — the southernmost point of the United States.
Drilled into the cliff are ancient koʻa — mooring holes carved into the rock, used to tie off canoes against the current. They are some of the oldest evidence of human occupation in Hawaiʻi: radiocarbon dating from nearby sites suggests Polynesian arrival here as early as 400–600 CE.
Reef · Papakōlea
Papakōlea — the green sand beach.
Just east of Ka Lae sits one of only four green-sand beaches in the world. The green is olivine, eroded out of an ancient cinder cone whose seaward wall the ocean has spent millennia disassembling.
Ocean · the open sea
The current that runs to Antarctica.
The Hawaiʻi Current runs south past Ka Lae and joins the South Equatorial Current. From here the next land is Antarctica, some 7,500 miles further south. The first canoes to find Hawaiʻi caught this current in reverse, sailing north out of the Marquesas or Tahiti, looking for new land. Whoever they were, they made landfall here.