Hawaii's volcanic origins are a million years old – and, with the eruption of Kilauea last year, just over a year old. Closer to the latter date than to the former, about 49,000 years ago, Pu'u Mahana, a tuff ring associated with Mauno Loa, was formed on the southern end of the Big Island. As the ocean eroded the tuff ring (which, Wikipedia informs me, is "mostly volcanic ash produced by violent interactions of magma with groundwater"), it carried away the lighter volcanic sand and left a sand made heavy by the presence of olivine, "a silicate material containing iron and magnesium," which makes the sand green.
Papakolea is one of only four green-sand beaches in the world.
One day while Mike and I were in Hawaii, we walked the two-and-a-half-mile trail to Papakolea, a confusing criss-cross of eroded four-wheel-drive roads gouged in bright red dirt across a completely flat, grassy plain—the "flats" of the name, Papakolea: "plover flats." It was beautiful to walk across the plateau of grass with the ocean blue on one side and distant mountains blue on the other. When we hesitated at the criss-cross of a road, we just followed footprints in the sand, though it didn't really matter which road we took, as they all led to the rim of the tuff ring that half-circled the beach below.
We stopped there, at the edge of the steep drop-off to the ocean, to take in the scene before becoming a part of it. A steep, curved, lava-rock wall, ash-gray, enclosed the bay on three sides. The sand on the beach was not emerald or Irish green but olive green. The ocean swept onto it with large, blue, white-frothy waves. The cliffs to the beach were almost vertically steep, and on one side the ocean had eroded the lava in long, wavy patterns.
The trail was steep but not difficult. Once I was on the sand itself, coarse, glittering, and green, I immediately pulled off my dress (I was wearing my bathing suit) and walked to the water.
The waves were ferocious! I had been warned about a strong undertow, so I didn't want to swim. Standing at the edge of the surf, I let the waves wash over my legs and pull at me with strong seduction, a tactile Siren enticing me deeper into the ocean. I resisted, tottering with the effort to stay on my feet, which dug holes in the sand as the undertow pulled on them.
Two men were boogie-boarding, which looked like fun, but another man was body surfing, which did not look like fun. The waves ground him into the coarse, heavy sand, pushing him down and tumbling him around like an electric mixer. He got up to do it again, but it wasn't for me!
When Mike and I had had enough of the sand and waves and wind, we climbed back up to the flat top, then walked on the rock-cliff tops to the high, narrow point jutting into, but high above, the ocean to stand on the southernmost tip of the United States. Looking down, we could see the white-foam waves hitting the green-sand beach far below.
From this distance there was also something beautiful about the red-slashed lines in the Irish-green flats beyond the beach, in spite of their origins.
On Hawaii, you expect beauty because it's everywhere—ocean, beaches, mountains, blossoming trees, tropical vegetation, fish, birds—but Papakolea coupled its exceptional beauty with its uniqueness to give us an experience of one of the most beautiful places on the Big Island.
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