Kahuku Visitor Contact Station

The Kahuku Visitor Contact Station is the information hub for the Kahuku Unit, a separate, remote part of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes in Kaʻū. If you’re heading to this unit’s hikes, start here: staff offer maps and help with route choices, and you can request a 15-minute orientation. There’s also a books-and-gifts shop, parking, public composting toilets and a picnic table. Kahuku is about an hour from the Welcome Center near Kīlauea and keeps its own schedule, so check opening days before making the drive.

Kahuku’s trails cross pasture, woodland and old lava. The short Puʻu o Lokuana Cinder Cone loop is 0.4 mile, and the Palm Trail loop is 2.6 miles. For a tougher outing, the Pit Crater Trail climbs 1,165 feet over 2.4 miles to a forested crater; there’s an optional 1.7-mile loop at the crater before you return the way you came. Hikers on the Pit Crater and Glover trails must decontaminate at the Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death quarantine gate.

The long ridges visible along Puʻu o Lokuana and Kamakapaʻa trails are remains of Kaʻū’s rain-fed field system. Farmers built stone kuaiwi walls and planting mounds to manage moisture, warmth and erosion. The oldest dated feature documented in Kahuku is about 1400 CE; by the mid-1400s, the wider field system was already intensively managed. Take one of those trails to see the ridges in the landscape; they aren’t displays at the station itself.

Kahuku was an ahupuaʻa, a traditional land division that stretched from Mauna Loa’s summit caldera to the sea. Cattle introduced by George Vancouver in 1793 multiplied across the land; Mexican vaqueros arrived around 1830, and paniolo became the Hawaiian word for cowboy. Kahuku grew into one of Hawaiʻi’s oldest ranches.

A Mauna Loa eruption and earthquakes in 1868 destroyed ranch owner Robert Brown’s home. Parker Ranch acquired Kahuku in 1912. In the 1940s, the military built a secret radar station here; cement footings remain in the cinder quarry. Kahuku became part of the national park in 2003.