Little Beach (Puʻu Olaʻi), Maui: Hours, Access and Rules

The weekend gate closes at four

Most people plan Little Beach around Big Beach's hours and get caught. DLNR lists Puʻu Olaʻi on its own line: 5:00am to 4:00pm on Saturday and Sunday, 5:00am to 7:00pm the rest of the week.

Work backwards from that. The walk over the point takes longer than it looks, it's uneven, and doing it in a hurry on hot rock is how ankles get turned. If you're arriving on a weekend afternoon, the honest answer is that there may not be enough day left.

Why four, and not seven like everywhere else

Because of the drum circle. This is the part almost nobody explains, and it is the reason the hours table looks inconsistent.

For years, a Sunday sunset gathering with drumming and dancing drew crowds to this beach. DLNR's own account, published in November 2020, put it at 200 to 225 people that night and described a Sunday tradition that had run weekly for years. The Honolulu Advertiser was already writing about the drum circle here in 2001, so this was not a new thing.

On 5 January 2021 the state closed Puʻu Olaʻi outright, citing gatherings of an estimated 400 people along with alcohol, drug use and nudity. Fencing and closed signs went up at the head of the path. The beach reopened on 12 March 2021, and the new 4:00pm weekend closing came with it. DLNR said so in the subheading of the release: earlier weekend closings aimed at stopping large gatherings.

Two things follow from that. The 4:00pm rule is not arbitrary and is unlikely to be relaxed, because it exists to prevent something specific. And whether people still gather on Sunday evenings is not something we can tell you: no agency or news source has addressed it since March 2021, and the travel pages describing the drum circle in the present tense are recycling pre-2021 information. The COVID-era gate and fence are gone, which the acting state parks administrator confirmed on the record in June 2026.

Is Little Beach clothing optional?

No, and this is the single most repeated error about this beach. Hawaiʻi Administrative Rules section 13-146-38 prohibits nudity in every state park in the system. The rule text covers bathing, swimming, walking, sunbathing and simply remaining on the premises in the nude, with narrow exceptions for enclosed changing facilities and for breastfeeding.

Little Beach is inside Mākena State Park, so the rule applies here like anywhere else. Older guidebooks and a long local reputation say otherwise, and the reputation is real: the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court, ruling on a 1987 arrest at this beach, noted that it had been the site of frequent arrests for public nudity. That conviction was reversed, but on a technicality about how the rule had been adopted, not on any finding that nudity here was lawful.

The more useful case is recent. In June 2023 a Hawaiʻi appellate court upheld a nudity conviction arising from a Sunday afternoon at Puʻu Olaʻi in February 2022, on the strength of signs prohibiting nudity posted twenty and thirty yards from where the man was sitting. The same decision threw out his separate citation for being in a closed area, because the signage did not make clear which beach a visitor was standing on and therefore which closing time applied. So: the no-nudity rule has been enforced and upheld in this decade, and a court has already found the closing-time signage here confusing.

The same chapter covers a few things people assume are fine. Alcohol needs written permission from the board. Animals aren't allowed on beaches at all. Fires are limited to designated grounds with a fireplace or grill, and this park has none.

Nothing here but the beach

There are no facilities on Little Beach, and none in the park behind it either. The portable toilets are back at the Big Beach entrance, and there's no drinking water anywhere in Mākena State Park. Whatever you want for the afternoon comes over the point with you.

No lifeguard tower on this sand. The two towers on this coast are both at Big Beach.