Ke’e Beach – the end of the earth

If you drive and drive along Kauai’s main coastal road towards the north, there is only one place you can go – Ke’e Beach. Past Hanalei, past Tunnels beach, you finally end up at the end of the road and the start of the dramatic wildness that is the Na Pali coastline. In past years, you battled with many others to find a parking space alongside the final stretch of road, but now the route to the beach is controlled via permits which reduces the strain on nature as well as the people who live in that part of the island.

But what do you see when you get there – I’ll try and explain in this article, one in the series of my stories about Kauai.

I think you can see from this aerial shot why the road ends here. After following the narrow strip of flat land from Princeville and Hanalei which is the headland at the far left of this image, there is nowhere left to go. The cliffs are forbidding and steep and folded in on themselves to form the unique structure of the Na Pali coast. The only way forward is along the steep and very difficult multi-day hike to Kalalau beach.

From the ocean, the beach is dwarfed by those mountains, and you can get some idea what that Kalalau trail is so tough as it climbs up and around each of the cliffs and across the streams that flow down the valleys.

The beach itself is not normally pounded by the waves as there is a surrounding reef that takes some of the strain, but just one look at the erosion around the roots of these ironwood trees gives you some idea what a winter storm might look like:

You can get some idea of the way the reef controls the surf in this next image, which is pretty abstract and reminds me of the four elements (with perhaps a combination of two) that the ancient Greeks believed formed all matter – Fire, Air, Water and Earth:

But what people come for are the sunsets. Although you have been driving north, in reality you are going along the top edge of the island in the last stretch and facing towards the west. The sun obviously sets in a different direction as the seasons change, but you can usually be assured of something spectacular (as long as it isn’t raining!), and those sunsets change dramatically from visit to visit. The one above is on a cloudless day and so the sky is just lit in a beautiful orange hue. But it can also be dramatically red as though the hills themselves are on fire:

On other evenings you can use the rocks in the foreground for a more traditional sunset with the sun illuminating the clouds:

I also took the opportunity in this visit in late May (when the sun is quite far to the right of the coastline) to capture the sun itself sinking below the waves. I often think that tropical sunsets can be a bit disappointing when the sky is clear, or perhaps there are clouds miles out to sea on the horizon – one minute the sun is there, the next it has gone, leaving no trace of its passage! But this evening was definitely different:

I’ve written about this particular sunset in a separate story which can be found here.

One of my earliest images of the sunset from Ke’e is this one from 2009 – our second visit to Kauai. This has always been a favorite and it decorates the room of my home to this day!

And, of course, there is always an opportunity to add some drama with a black and white conversion of a sunset from 2012. This shows more of the drama of the spray that rises into each valley as the waves crash into the rocks.

I hope you have enjoyed this visit to the end of the road on Kauai. You can read the next article in these stories about beaches on Kauai here – Tunnels Beach.

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