Here are a few photos of Maui's semi-famous Pokowai Sea Arch, on a remote stretch of the island's south shore, along the Piʻilani Highway, the semi-sketchy back road to Hana. I was recently reminded I had these photos (and a post languishing in Drafts) by the recent (September 2026) collapse of the much better-known Hōlei Sea Arch on the Big Island. This one doesn't look like it's in any danger of collapsing anytime soon, but anything geological that seems to defy gravity -- sea arches, sea caves, land arches, balancing rocks, impossibly tall steep cliffs, etc. -- is just a temporary blip in geological time, if you really think about it, so you might as well go see it the next time you're in the area.
Ok, before doing that, if you're driving a rental car, maybe first check if your rental contract says not to go this way, and factor that into whether you go anyway. This used to be common, and some companies may still have clauses about it down in the fine print. I gather the main concern is that if you run into trouble, you could be somewhere remote without cell service to call for help, and the roads are so narrow in some places that standard tow trucks might not be able to reach you. So your best bet is to try not to run into trouble, if you can avoid it.
This isn't even the worst "highway" on the island, just to be clear. That particular crown belongs to the Kahekili Highway that winds up around the island's northwest corner. It's about as narrow as the Piʻilani Highway, and seemed to have significantly more traffic, probably because it looks like it ought to be the shortest and fastest road between the airport in Kahului and the swanky golf courses and spa resorts around Kapalua and Kāʻanapali . One time I had a person in a beat-up Hilux (so I assume local since you can't exactly rent those) aggressively tailgating me for part of the way until I finally found a place to pull off and let him by. Locals usually don't drive like that, so I'm going to assume he had just moved back after living in Miami or Atlanta for a decade or two and picking up an expensive coke habit in the process. Hopefully he eventually came to realize those East Coast survival skills are counterproductive back home.
Anyway, the parking lot to see the sea arch is just a wide gravel lot right off the highway, with a pullout immediately west of the Wai‘ōpae Gulch bridge and right before a cattle guard. Yes, an actual cattle guard. Maui County GIS says the land here isn't part of a a county or state or national park. Instead, it's part of a 1113.75 acre parcel that belongs to Haleakala Ranch, a large Maui cattle operation. In practice this doesn't affect you, the visitor, very much as Hawaiʻi has a statewide public shoreline access law, and that plus highway right-of-way means you have every right to park here and look at the sea arch and take photos and not get tasered over it. I mean, I assume so; Legal says I have to remind you that I'm not a lawyer, and if I was I'm still not your lawyer, and none of this is legal advice. There weren't any old timey cowpokes moseying around telling people to get off their back 40 when I was there, at least, but your mileage may vary, especially if someone from the mainland buys the area and tries to convert it into a hyper-exclusive jet-set golf resort for sneering oligarchs, which has happened repeatedly elsewhere around Maui.
There is surprisingly little information about it out there on the interwebs. There's a TripBucket page with one photo of the arch, and it's mentioned briefly on pages about the highway at Maui Guidebook, MauiGuide.com and Hawaii Drive-O.
It was not always like this. My draft post had links to a couple of other pages that have since fallen off the net and give 404s now, though the Wayback Machine has sorta-recent versions of the pages before they went away: A HawaiianIslands.com page (and an archived 2023 version) and Guide of US (and an archived 2019 version). I started forming a theory that it might be due to a local backlash against mass tourism in the wake of COVID and the Lahaina fire and an ever-escalating general crisis in affordability on the island (and statewide, and on the mainland, let's be clear about that). But then I remembered I'm working off a sample size of two and a vague memory that there were more sites where those two came from, and I probably shouldn't draw any big unscientific conclusions about Modern Society from this little bit of anecdata. Maybe it's just that all the Maui travel content has moved to Facebook now and isn't easily findable by search engines anymore, and although it flourished there for a couple of years it's now being rapidly crowded out by AI slop, maybe depicting the vast and improbable sea arches of Atlantis. Given what I was just saying about sample sizes and the scientific method and so on, I suppose I probably ought to go look around Facebook and verify that things continue to unfold in the worst possible way over there. But I have my limits, and I don't think I will.
