An interesting hill. This was taken from Hanakapiai beach, so we turned right at the river to get here. If you look closely at the bottom of the pic you can see a couple tiny people, to give you some scale. I'm standing on beach sand, though my feet are being washed by cool mountain stream water, as I take this picture. Swimming in the ocean at Hanakapiai is a bad idea for tourists. The river creates holes in the sandbars, which the waves go over evenly, but then the ocean gets sucked through the holes at terrific speeds on the way out, creating rip tides and such. Hanakapiai is bad news because there are no lifeguards, no phones, and worst of all, no surfers...
During the summer Hanakapiai beach is a wide, long, golden crescent of sand, but after winter's first huge swell all the sand disappears until summer.