About Big Island Helicopter Waterfalls
While I’ve featured several Big Island Waterfalls on this website, there are still countless more.
The vast majority of these waterfalls are concentrated on the windward sides of both the Kohala Mountains as well as Mauna Kea.
Most of these are either inaccessible or private.
Thus, I created this page to showcase the waterfalls seen on our lone successful helicopter tour.
On that tour, we managed to fly over the volcanoes towards the southeast part of the Big Island, then we swung northwards along the Hamakua Coast.
This exposed us to many waterfalls we were familiar with on our self-tours, but we also spotted many more waterfalls that we couldn’t have accessed.
We also flew by the mouth of the Waipi’o Valley and into the more remote Waimanu Valley, which were among the secluded valleys of the Kohala Mountains.
Kapoloa Falls
The original intent of doing this helicopter tour was to seek out the Kapoloa Falls.
This was the same waterfall that Samantha Brown featured on her show, which Julie and I chanced upon while channel surfing one day.
Unfortunately, the Kona Earthquake of October 2006 caused extensive damage to the Kohala Ditch Trail deep into Pololu Valley.
That essentially rendered this waterfall inaccessible to the general public.
Guided tours used to be the only way to properly visit the waterfall on foot since the trail passed through private land.
Unfortunately, on our particular 2008 chopper tour, we never got a chance to witness the Kapoloa Falls.
Even despite verbal agreement that the pilot would fly into the back of Pololu Valley to see this falls, he ended up forgetting about it and flew over some World War II wreckage instead.
We’ve made numerous attempts at doing a chopper ride on the Big Island, but we were only successful once.
So we can appreciate how much weather really affects this kind of tour.
Helicopter tour companies are more spread out on the Big Island of Hawaii than on the other Hawaiian Islands.
We know that there are a couple near Waikoloa.
I recalled Blue Hawaiian had one helipad there while Tropical had one near a resort in Waikoloa.
Meanwhile, we also managed to do a Paradise Helicopter Tour, which took off from the Kona Airport.
There are more tour companies leaving from Hilo, which would be the preferred base since choppers wouldn’t have to fly as far to visit both the lava and the Kohala Mountains.
I know I’m being a bit vague here as the directions alone to each of the tour companies would be a huge undertaking.
So I’ll just punt you over to the chopper companies of your choice as they’ll provide you with directions when you book.
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