Kauai has many wonderful hikes but there are also a number of excellent seacliff routes down to pocket beaches.   Many of these are off backroads to a parking spot.   Larsen’s Beach is down  Koolau Road south of Kilauea, then along the Larsens Beach sideroad.   At the end of the gravel road are a number of parking spots.   The trail then winds down the seacliffs to the shoreline.   Hikers can either follow a single track through the scrub forest or walk along the beach.   We followed the trail for 1.5 km to the end, then walked back along the beach and over a few rocky sections.

Not far south of Larsen’s Beach is Moloa’a Bay, one of our favorite beach and seacliff hikes.

• Moloa’a Bluffs

A steady northeasterly kept the waves coming vigorously in to both beaches.   There are small pockets of reef in Moloa’a Bay and a longer but shallow reef at Larsen’s Beach so any swimming has to be done carefully.  On Kauai some beaches are for swimming and snorkeling, some are for surfing, and some are just for exploration with some shallow wading.

We enjoy hiking along the seacliffs to the north of Moloa’a Bay.   We can often observe seabirds, whales, and sea turtles from the viewpoints.   On this day, the crashing surf was ever present.   Red footed boobies were sweeping along the rolling waves for fish.   Frigate birds cruised overhead and we watched one dive to chase boobies, preying on sea birds from above.

We can’t hike between Moloa’a and Larsen’s because of private property.   Above Larsen’s beach a large estate has been purchased by Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook) for $100 million and development is ongoing on the slopes above.   There are a number of lawsuits related to aboriginal title rights along this section of the island.

Larsen’s beach is just a narrow strip of sand with scrubby trees upslope and a shallow reef to buffer some of the waves, but because it is a harder route to get to, it has a remote feel and we saw very few people.

This is a perfect place for a hike, exploration, a beach sit for lunch and a dip, a beach walk, and a climb along the rocks back to the vehicle.

The far end of the beach has a few discrete nudists so we just bypassed these sections, respecting privacy.

One of our favorite activities is to remove our shoes and walk along the water’s edge.   This kind of hiking is completely unlike what we do for the rest of the year so we return to the less-populated areas of the Hawaiian Islands to hike the seacliffs and pocket beaches whenever we can.