CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC since 2024, when lack of funding shut the reserve and the site passed to the landowner, Grove Farm. The largest limestone cave in Hawaii, on Kaua‘i’s south coast near Māhā‘ulepū Beach, reached through a sinkhole whose old lake holds nearly 10,000 years of sediment. Digging in it has turned up pollen, seeds, shells, Polynesian artifacts and thousands of bird and fish bones, and it has been called maybe the richest fossil site in the Hawaiian Islands. Remains of about 40 bird species lie in it, half of them now extinct, among them the turtle-jawed moa-nalo, a giant flightless duck, and the Kaua‘i mole duck. It also showed that kou and hala, long taken for Polynesian introductions, grew here before people arrived. Check with Grove Farm before you go.
Bones of extinct birds, land snails, pollen and seeds · Holocene, the last ~10,000 years
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
