Up here at the Nu'uanu Pali Lookout, 1,200 feet above sea level on the dramatic windward face of the Ko'olau Range, you are at one of the most consequential sites in Hawaiian history. In 1795, King Kamehameha I launched his conquest of O'ahu with an amphibious invasion from the north shore and pushed O'ahu's defenders up through the Nu'uanu Valley toward this very cliff. At the Battle of Nu'uanu, the defending O'ahu warriors, led by their chief Kalanikupule, were driven relentlessly upward by Kamehameha's forces, which included two Western advisors who helped operate captured cannon.
When they reached the edge of these cliffs, hundreds of O'ahu warriors chose to leap — or were driven — over the precipice rather than surrender. In 1898, when workers were building the Old Pali Road, they found hundreds of skulls and bones at the base of the cliffs, the physical evidence of that terrible day. Kamehameha's victory here gave him control of O'ahu, and within fifteen years he had unified all the major Hawaiian islands under his rule for the first time in history.
The trade winds funnel through this gap in the Ko'olau Ridge with extraordinary force on most days, and the view down the windward coast of O'ahu — green, steep, and vertiginous — is one of the most dramatic landscapes in the Pacific.