ʻAkaka Falls drops 442 feet in a single fall above Honomū, on the Hāmākua Coast north of Hilo. Two stories attach to the place: a chief named ʻAkaka who leapt from the cliff, and a stone at the water that people struck to call down rain.
The legend of the chief ʻAkaka
The story people tell today runs like this. ʻAkaka was a chief who kept two lovers hidden from his wife. When she found out, he fled and threw himself off the cliff where the falls now drop. The retellings do not agree on the rest, on which lover stood on which side of the stream, or on what became of the two women.
The older tradition for this spot is about a stone at the falls, named Pōhaku-a-Pele, the stone of Pele. Strike it with a branch of lehua ʻāpane, the dark-red ʻōhiʻa blossom, and the sky darkens and rain falls. A second large stone, Pōhaku-o-Kāloa, sits in the middle of the stream a short way above the falls.
Visiting ʻAkaka Falls State Park
ʻAkaka Falls State Park sits at the end of ʻAkaka Falls Road, Highway 220, about 3.6 miles southwest of Honomū and 11 miles north of Hilo. A paved loop of about 0.4 miles runs through the park to the overlook, where the falls drop 442 feet on Kolekole Stream. The loop has steps and is not wheelchair accessible.
The 422 ft. tall Akaka falls on the Big Island of Hawaii are a pleasant stop on your way to or from Hilo
On the loop you also pass Kahuna Falls across the gorge. Our ʻAkaka Falls guide covers the hours, fees, and parking. The Rainbow Falls legend from Hilo and the rest of the stories sit on the Big Island mythology hub.
About this telling
The leap story of the chief has no known Hawaiian-language original. It appears in modern travel writing but not in the known Hawaiian record of the 1800s and early 1900s. The tradition that is written down belongs to the stones: the rain-calling Pōhaku-a-Pele and Pōhaku-o-Kāloa appear in Pukui, Elbert and Mookini’s Place Names of Hawaiʻi (1974). Helen Lindsey Parker’s Hawaiian-language song of the falls, Wailele ʻO ʻAkaka, praises the fine-falling water and the wild ginger of the uplands without telling the chief’s story.
Emma Nakuina, writing in 1920, named the story of ʻAkaka Falls as a Hawaiian tradition worth teaching, though she did not set down its plot. No Hawaiian-language telling of the chief’s leap is known.
Read more
- Place Names of Hawaiʻi, on Ulukau. Free to read, and the only written source behind this page. Look up ʻAkaka and Pōhaku-a-Pele for the rain-calling tradition. There is nothing to send you to for the chief’s leap, because nobody wrote it down.