Nā Pali Coast

For a thousand years, Hawaiians lived on the Na Pali Coast in valleys no road has ever reached. The cliffs — na pali, 'the cliffs' — rise four thousand feet from the Pacific in fluted walls, and behind them the valleys of Kalalau, Nu'alolo, and Honopu held communities that farmed terraced taro lo'i along the streams, fished the reefs, and moved between valleys by canoe and by trails cut into cliff faces so steep that a nineteenth-century guidebook called them 'impassable, with yawning abysses on each side.' The missionaries came by canoe in 1821; the road never came at all.

The last residents left Kalalau in 1919 — the valley was briefly used for cattle grazing, then returned to the state, and the terraces and heiau platforms are still there under the guava. The Kalalau Trail, eleven miles across five valleys and a thousand feet of cliff, is the only land access — the same footpath the Hawaiians used, rebuilt in the 1930s. Nu'alolo Kai kept its hanging ladder: the cliff rope ladder that was the only way down to the fishing village, and the site of one of the great excavations in Pacific archaeology.

The coast is a state park now, accessible only by the trail, by boat, or by helicopter — twelve miles of wilderness that was a populated world for a millennium and empties only because the people were finally priced out of paradise. The terraces are still visible from the trail; the stones remember.