Maui’s Seven Sacred Pools is a Bust

I’ve been to the Seven Sacred Pools three times now, and that’s one too many. It’s a beautiful place past Hana on the island of Maui. Paia is about the best place to get gas and food on the way there. It’s a very cute, very small town. The road from Paia to Hana is famous for all its curves and fifty-nine little bridges. It goes to the wet side of Maui and there is a lot of lush jungle foliage to see. Forty-six of the bridges are one lane. You have to completely stop your car often to let oncoming traffic go by on the one-lane sections.

I must say that the Seven Sacred Pools, or O’heo Gulch, may be the world’s best swimming hole when everything is right. Weather is the determinant. The last time I went, there was a rain storm in the mountains and that can cause flash flooding like the flood that swept 2 people out to sea a few years ago and they drowned. When there is a drought, the pools become puddles full of bacteria, mosquitoes, and algae.

I hit it right the first two times I went and I felt like I was in a Tarzan movie. There are philodendron vines climbing fifty feet or more up the gulch’s rock walls. It’s a great place to swim. You can play under the seven mini waterfalls and jump back in the water.

My third trip there was marred by a rainstorm as I mentioned. The rangers who take care of the place had the pools roped off and no one was allowed very close to it for fear of an approaching flash flood.

The worst thing about the trip, however, was the ride back to Lahaina. Not only is this a dangerously narrow, twisty road when you are alone, but add some traffic and it becomes a nightmare. RVs are not able to deal with this road at all. Things weren’t so bad, I thought, until a local person in a Toyota 4 wheel drive pickup not only passed me on a blind curve, but the three cars ahead of me as well. That pass took a full 45 seconds and the driver was just assuming no cars would be coming head on while she was passing, going about forty miles an hour. She could probably see ahead about 4 car lengths the whole time. It’s one of the craziest stunts I’ve ever seen. You can imagine my jangled nerves during the next couple of hours until I got back to Paia. Any minute I was expecting to see her or a neighbor of hers coming back at me head on. I hope this isn’t a custom of the locals. I did a quick search of the Internet for “accident pickup Hana” and there were hundreds of hits with the search engine. That isn’t very encouraging. No wonder all the souvenir shops in Lahaina were out of the “I survived the road to Hana” T shirts.

I won’t go on that trip again, and I can’t recommend that you try it.