Editorial Policy

State the number, name the source, date it

Hours, fees, facilities, rules and hazards are published as figures rather than as instructions to go and check. Each one carries the agency that published it and the date it was read. That is the whole policy, and everything below follows from it.

The reason is practical. "Confirm current fees with DLNR" gives a reader nothing they did not already have. "Non-residents pay $5.00 per person plus $10 per vehicle, per DLNR, checked August 30, 2026" can be planned around, and it can be checked against the source if you doubt it.

What happens when we cannot verify something

The field says nothing was published, and stays empty. This site does not estimate a parking capacity, infer a lifeguard schedule from a travel page, or round two conflicting stall counts into a third number nobody published.

Some concrete examples of things deliberately left out: staffed lifeguard hours at Big Beach, the height of Puʻu Olaʻi, the surface of the Oneʻuli access road, and whether Mākena Landing was ever a whaling port. Each is widely repeated elsewhere. None of them held up.

When sources disagree

Both stay on the page, named and dated, with an explanation of why they differ. Picking silently would be more readable and less honest.

The clearest case on this site is the 1790 date for the lava flow south of Mākena. Almost every source repeats it. The USGS dates that flow to between A.D. 1420 and 1620 on radiocarbon and paleomagnetic evidence, and also records that Hawaiian oral history collected in 1841 points to something much more recent. The USGS says openly that the discrepancy is unresolved, so this site says so too.

No invented experience

Nobody writing this site claims to have swum at these beaches, and you will not find a first-person account, an invented visit or a remembered afternoon anywhere on it. Fabricated experience is the easiest thing in travel writing to produce and the least defensible.

What stands in for it is specificity. Knowing that the Little Beach gate closes at 4pm on weekends, that there is no drinking water anywhere in the park, that the NOAA tide station actually named Makena is not the one most sites quote. That knowledge comes from reading sources carefully, which is a claim this site can actually support.

Safety information is handled differently

One hazard on this coast gets special treatment. The shore break at Big Beach is published as a permanent warning that is never tied to a wave height, a season or a forecast, and it never appears as a reassuring reading.

That is deliberate. The Hawaiʻi Trauma Registry recorded 33 spinal injuries at this beach between 2009 and 2017, the highest total in the state, and the mechanism behind them is the shape of the beach rather than the size of the surf. A green badge derived from a wave model would make the page actively worse than showing nothing, so this site does not publish one.

Recheck cadence and corrections

Stable facts are rechecked quarterly. An automated monitor reads DLNR's park notices and its hours and fees table twice an hour and flags any difference from the figures stored here, so drift surfaces as an alert instead of sitting on the page.

A correction updates the checked date on the affected fact. If a figure here is wrong, the agency page is right, and telling us means the next reader gets it right too.

Independence

This site is not affiliated with Hawaiʻi DLNR, the County of Maui, Mākena Golf & Beach Club or any emergency service. There is no paid placement on it. Any future affiliate relationship will be disclosed beside the relevant link, and will not affect safety information or which sources get used.