Kaliko P.
Yelp
If you are old enough to remember the heyday of beach-going at Mok's you are probably over 40, and by that I mean the days when Mokuleia Beach had a full bathroom complex with shower stalls, toilets, changing rooms and BBQ grills, and because of this the beach was pretty popular with local families and tourists before the days of Yelp, IG and Tripadvisor. It was a place you could always go to for the same familiar, predictable beauty of a beach- it had rough, secluded, rugged, windswept shores with a wild beauty to it and you couldn't help but feel a certain romantic quality every time you came here.
I remember childhood days when we'd trek out from town to Mokuleia as a family and spend all day here because the drive was so long. We'd BBQ, swim, play, look for shells, watch the parachuters come down from the sky, sleep under the towels in the warm sun, shower in the lava rock encrusted compound, then head home by sunset. I'd haunt this place in the summer time as a teenager when I first learned how to drive, and me and a friend would come out for an all-day tanning fest and watch the sun go down while eating our sandwiches and drinking our cans of Hawaiian Sun fruit drinks. Maybe of all the beaches, this beach held so many fond memories for me.
As the saying goes 'all good things must come to an end' and so it did -the bathrooms and shower stalls were all razed down to the ground years ago because the state of Hawaii could no longer maintain the property. They also wanted to deter the many homeless that had set up camp and permanent residence around the perimeter of the beach park. The state figured if there were no showers and no flushing toilets the homeless would leave, and they did. Now all that's left are porta potties dotting the landscape. There are no more BBQ areas and the parking lot pavement is falling apart. The place is no longer romantic to me as the landscape has changed so much and what I remember from my childhood and young adulthood is so much more different.
There doesn't seem to be as many families anymore and the park is not a hotspot of activity as it used to have, but the place still holds onto its wild rugged beauty and manages to survive without the presence of humans. If you want isolated, limited, windy, wild and rugged, come here to a beach with limited resources. It's only a few hundred feet from the main road and it seems like a few hundred miles from Honolulu.