Pohoiki Black Sand Beach

Pohoiki black sand beach did not exist before 2018. When Kīlauea’s lower East Rift Zone eruption poured lava into the ocean nearby, the waves ground that fresh rock into black sand and piled it into the bay in a matter of weeks. It is the youngest black sand beach on the Big Island, at Isaac Hale Beach Park in lower Puna, at the end of Highway 137 past Kaimū.

This is not a swimming beach. A dangerous shore break and strong currents run along the sand, and a lifeguard tower overlooks it for a reason. The same eruption left several warm ocean ponds at the park and cut off the boat ramp, which a 2025 dredging project reopened for 1 day.

Lava boulders line the water’s edge at Pohoiki, making it hard to enter the ocean even on calm days. The coarse sand and rocky waterline are what you expect from a beach this young. Combined with shore break and strong currents, this stretch is not a place to go in the water.

Isaac Kepoʻokalani Hale Beach Park

Isaac Hale is a county beach park, but a bare-bones one. It is a calm, family-friendly spot, and several services you would expect from a county park still are not here. Please kōkua (help, assist) to keep the park safe and clean for your ʻohana and everyone else.

• Park hours are 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. daily.
• There is no drinking water in the park, so bring plenty when you visit.
• There are portable toilets available.
• A lifeguard tower overlooks the beach
• The lava flow created several natural ocean thermal ponds. The Department of Health is giving notice that these ponds are not disinfected and, due to the risk of bacterial infections, the public should not enter these ponds if they have open wounds. Enter these ponds at your own risk.
• There is a dangerous shore break on the new black sand beach and dangerous ocean currents which could cause injury. Enter the ocean at your own risk.

The lifeguard tower at Isaac Hale Beach Park overlooks Pohoiki black sand beach. The beach is not safe for swimming: the shore break is strong and the currents run hard. Lifeguard is on duty during park hours, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Directions to Pohoiki (Isaac Hale Beach Park)

Pohoiki Beach sits at the intersection of Pohoiki Road and the scenic Kapoho-Kalapana Road (Route 137) in the Puna district of Hawaiʻi Island. These roads were overrun by lava, but by November 2018 a new road between MacKenzie State Park and Pohoiki was cleared.

The simplest route from Pāhoa is to follow Hwy 130 to its end, then turn left onto Hwy 137, which now ends at Pohoiki. The drive takes you past Kaimū Beach Park and along one of our favorite scenic drives.

Looking back from the black sand at Isaac Hale Beach Park: the lifeguard tower, the warm ocean thermal pond near the boat ramp, and the parking area are all visible. The solidified lava along the coastline marks the edge of the 2018 Kīlauea flow that created this beach.

Pohoiki black sand beach

Pohoiki, officially Isaac Hale Beach Park, is a varied stretch of coast in the Puna district: a recreation area, several warm ocean thermal ponds, the young black sand beach, and a boat ramp that is the only ocean access in the district.

Pohoiki bay was almost filled with lava, but the flow stopped a mere 230 ft (70 m) from the harbor. The well-known surf breaks Bowls, Shacks, and Dead Trees are gone, buried along with part of the park.

The boat ramp and most of the park survived, and in the months after the eruption black sand piled into the bay to form the beach that is there today.

On this aerial image from August 31, 2018 you can see a black sand beach made out of black sand and lava fragments forming in front of the Pohoiki Boat Ramp. Image credit: USGS

The beach started out steep and coarse, and the waves have been grinding the lava fragments finer ever since. This is young, raw coastline, and it looks the part.

The uncertain future of Pohoiki black sand beach

The beach’s long-term future is still an open question. Black sand beaches that form this fast often wash away within a few years, because no new lava is feeding them sand. The slowly shrinking Kaimū black sand beach down the coast is the cautionary example.

The boat ramp question, also remains to be settled. Pohoiki is the only boat launch in the Puna district, and the fishing community lost its ocean access when the 2018 sand and lava sealed the ramp off. In 2025 the state and county dredged roughly 42,000 cubic yards of sand and rock from the ramp’s entrance channel, a $9.28 million project to reopen it. The park closed for the work on September 2, 2025 and reopened on November 12, 2025. It then took less then 1 day for the ocean currents to close off the harbor again.

Before the 2018 LERZ eruption the Pohoiki pier and boat ramp were a great place to be in the water.

Destruction and Creation: a black sand beach rises from the lava

The Big Island is a place where opposites meet: fire and water, tundra and monsoon, rainforest and desert, creation and destruction, often within a few miles of each other. That last pairing, creation and destruction, is nowhere more literal than at Pohoiki.

The 2018 Lower East Rift Zone eruption was the latest chapter. Between early May and early August, surface lava flows destroyed more than 700 houses and buried some of the most loved spots in Puna: the Kapoho Tide Pools and the Ahalanui Hot Ponds.

Isaac Hale (Pohoiki) beach park also came very close to annihilation but survived. If you are curious, this video (on Instagram) shows what Pohoiki looked like when the 2018 eruption was just starting. All the coastline in the second part of the video below (beyond the pier) has since disappeared under lava.

At the end of the eruption, 13.7 square miles of the Big Island were covered by new lava, and more than 1.3 square miles of new land was created. From this destruction, however, new things were born:

Land, for example. A LOT of lava flowed into the ocean during the LERZ eruption: 875 acres (3.5 km^2) of new lava delta was created. Some of this delta may collapse into the ocean again, but at the end of the day the Big Island will probably have grown by about one square mile!

Black sand is another thing that was created in bulk. When hot lava hits the ocean it solidifies fast and shatters into countless small fragments, which the waves then grind into fine black sand. Fun fact: every grain of black sand on Hawaiʻi’s beaches was once red-hot lava.

This black sand washed, and still washes, along the nearby coast, building several new black sand beaches. The best known of them is the one that formed in front of the Pohoiki boat launch: (new) Pohoiki black sand beach.

In October 2018, just months after it formed, the new beach looked like this:

(Video credit: StrangeHawaii). Check out the first 7 minutes of this video to see what the hike to Pohoiki from MacKenzie State Park is like.