Makapu‘u Point Lighthouse Trail

This guide to the Makapu'u Point Lighthouse Trail follows an oversized lens ordered from a Paris workshop in 1887, a twelve-foot giant of eleven hundred eighty-eight prisms too large for any lighthouse of its day, that spent years touring the world's fairs in Chicago and Virginia instead. It traces how a 1906 shipwreck on the reef below this cliff finally gave Congress a reason to build a light here, and how workers hauled the orphaned lens up the cliff by rope and pulley. Look for the concrete tower housing it today, and the scar it still carries from a 1984 gunshot.