The question everyone asks second

Cliff jumping at Black Rock, honestly.

Every guide on the internet will tell you how to make this jump. We counted: not one of them states the legal position, and not one of them prints the death toll for the water you are landing in. This page does both, and then tells you the things a local would tell you at the top. What you do with it is your call.

Height: ~20 ft · 12–30 by tide
Legality: Unconfirmed — see below
Where: South face, Puʻu Kekaʻa
Lifeguard: None
Deaths 2009–18: 24 at this rock

Is cliff jumping at Black Rock legal?

We don’t know, and neither does anyone else publishing on this. We looked for a county ordinance, a state rule, a posted prohibition and an official statement — in either direction — and found none. So the honest answer is that the legal status of the Black Rock jump is unestablished, not legal and not illegal, and we would rather say that than pick the version that reads better.

That matters more than it sounds. Read six travel pages on this jump and you get six confident descriptions of how to do it and zero mentions of whether you are allowed to — on a promontory where people jump every day.

What is posted, at the shoreline rocks, is signage warning people to keep out because the rock is unstable. Read it for what it says. It is a warning about loose lava underfoot, not a prohibition on the jump — and treating one as the other is how the rumour mill on this subject got started.

What we have asked, and who we asked

We have put the question on the record with Maui County Parks & Recreation and the Ocean Safety Bureau: is jumping from Puʻu Kekaʻa prohibited by any ordinance, rule or permit condition, and is it enforced? When we get an answer, it goes at the top of this page with the date and the name of the person who gave it.

Until then, do not read “we could not find a prohibition” as “it is legal.” Read it as what it is: nobody has told the public, and that is its own kind of problem.

Searched: Maui County Code and Parks & Recreation rules, State of Hawaii DLNR and Ocean Safety materials, on-site signage, and the ten highest-ranking travel guides for this query. No source in either direction. This section gets replaced with a sourced statement, not softened.

How high is the Black Rock cliff jump?

The commonly used ledge on the south face is about 20 feet above the water. Reported figures range from 12 to 30 feet, and that spread is not sloppy reporting — it is the tide. The rock does not move; the water does. A number someone posted in July at high tide is not the number you are looking at in January at low.

Reported heights at Puʻu Kekaʻa
The spot	Height	What it means
Common jump ledge, south face	~20 ft	The one most people use. This is the working figure.
Range across reports	12–30 ft	The variation is tidal. Look at the water, not at a blog post.
Ceremonial dive point	~35 ft	Higher, and used once a day by someone who has trained for it.

Anyone giving you a single confident number for this jump is quoting whoever they read last. The useful version is the range plus the caveat.

What actually goes wrong here?

Not the jump, usually. The water.

The record at this rock

Black Rock is the second most dangerous swimming location on Maui, with 24 drowning deaths between 2009 and 2018 — predominantly non-resident snorkelers, per The Maui News. Across Maui County there were 221 ocean drownings from 2013 to 2022, about 22 a year, and 69 percent of the dead were visitors. The Ocean Safety Bureau names Kāʻanapali and Puʻu Kekaʻa a hot spot.

There is no lifeguard. Not at the rock, not anywhere on Kaanapali Beach — the nearest tower is Hanakaoʻo Beach Park at the far south end, 8:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., and a tower for this end was still in the design phase as of May 2026. If something goes wrong below you, the response is whoever else happens to be swimming.

In May 2026, a 75-year-old visitor went snorkeling at Black Rock and disappeared. A guest reported someone in distress around 3 p.m.; hotel staff found no one and did not call 911; his wife reported him missing at 6:07 p.m. The search covered more than 842 square nautical miles and was suspended three days later. That is the ambient level of supervision here, on a busy afternoon, in front of a resort.

The current lives on the north side. The back of the point is the most dangerous water in Kaanapali — strong, invisible from shore, pulling seaward rather than under, recognisable from the water by a murky haze near the sea cave. A jump that drifts you around the corner is a different situation from the one you planned.

And the beach itself breaks hard. Shore break causes most injuries at Kaanapali — documented cases include broken and dislocated limbs and head injuries — and winter northwest swell raises all of it.

Sources: The Maui News, May 2026 (the 24 deaths, the ranking and the May 2026 disappearance); Maui Now, 19 November 2025 (county drowning totals, Ocean Safety Bureau hot-spot designation); the State of Hawaii Ocean Safety list of lifeguarded beaches; Maui Guidebook on shore-break injuries; County Fire spokesperson Chris Stankis on the tower’s status. The current on the north side is corroborated across multiple independent sources including first-hand accounts — see safety and conditions for the full picture.

If you are going to jump anyway

You’re an adult and this is a page, not a parent. So here is what people who actually know this rock do, in the order they do it.

The six things, in order

1. Swim it first. Check the entry from the water before you climb anything — the bottom, the depth, where the rock shelves out. From below, where the information actually is. Most of what goes wrong here is somebody jumping into water they never looked at.

2. South face only. Deep water, other swimmers, somebody who can see you. The north side is the current described above; there is no version of this where the back of the rock is the interesting option.

3. Feet first, every time. Going in head-first over a bottom whose depth changes with the tide is the one decision on this page that turns a bad day into a permanent one.

4. Never on a rising or big swell. Watch a full set before you commit — not one wave, a set. Rising swell changes the entry depth and the surge against the rock while you are still deciding. Winter is the season to be fussiest.

5. Never alone. As May 2026 demonstrated, being visible from a hotel is not the same as being watched. Bring someone whose job for ten minutes is to look at you.

6. Never after drinking. Writes itself — and the beach bar is two minutes away, which is precisely why it needs saying.

Also, mundanely: the rock is sharp and slick, the climb is barefoot for most people, and the walk up is where the ankles go. Watch where you put your feet on the way to the dramatic part.

What you are actually jumping off

Puʻu Kekaʻa is not a rock with a nice view. It is revered as ka leina a ka ʻuhane — the place where a soul leaps into eternity — one of several such leina recognized across the islands, and the Kāʻanapali Beach Resort Association reports a heiau once stood at the summit. It is on the marker on the beach walk, a two-minute read.

There is a real irony here and it is worth sitting with rather than skipping. Chief Kahekili, who ruled Maui around 1766 to 1793, excelled at lele kawa and gained his warriors’ respect precisely by leaping from this point — because they feared the spirits here and he did it anyway. So jumping off Puʻu Kekaʻa is not foreign to the place. But his leap meant something specific, in a context, in front of people who understood it. A GoPro clip is not that, and pretending otherwise is the part that lands badly with people who live here.

None of which is a rule. It is context, and you can hold it and still jump. What is worth avoiding is climbing this rock knowing none of it — or climbing it during someone else’s ceremony. The Black Rock hub page has the fuller history and the etiquette.

The 35-foot version you can just watch

At sunset, someone makes a higher jump off this rock than the one you are weighing up — with a conch shell, a line of tiki torches and a chant behind it. The lele kawa cliff-diving ceremony has run at Puʻu Kekaʻa since the Sheraton opened in 1963, takes about ten minutes, and costs nothing.

If you look over the edge and think better of it, that is not a wasted trip. Get in the water in the morning instead — the south face snorkel is the genuinely great thing at this rock — and come back at sunset. There is a lot more to Kaanapali Beach than its most photographed ledge. Sort out where to leave the car first; the Sheraton’s twenty public stalls go before eight in the morning.

Where to stand if you are watching, not jumping

From the sand in front of the Sheraton looking north, or from the beach walk just south of the promontory for elevation and a clean line to the torches. Arrive 30 minutes before sunset, and do not climb the rock during the ceremony — that is the one moment where the etiquette is not ambiguous.

Free field guide

The field guide maps the south face, the entry depths, the north-side current and the morning window when this water is at its most readable. Twelve pages, on your phone, before you get anywhere near the top.

Download the Guide

FAQ

Cliff jumping questions, answered straight

Can you cliff jump at Black Rock?

People jump from the ledge on the south face daily, and it is one of the best-known jumps on Maui. We have not been able to find a county ordinance, state rule or posted prohibition that bans it, and no travel guide states the legal position either way — so treat “legal” as unconfirmed rather than established. What is posted is signage warning about unstable rock at the shoreline. This page will be updated the moment we have an on-record answer from Maui County.

How high is the Black Rock cliff jump?

The common jump ledge is roughly 20 feet above the water, though reported figures range from about 12 to 30 feet depending on the tide — which is exactly the point: the height changes with the water. The ceremonial dive from the higher point is around 35 feet.

Is it safe to jump off Black Rock?

It is a jump into open ocean with no lifeguard, from loose rock, into water that has killed 24 people in a decade. If you jump: check the entry from the water first, jump only from the south face where the water is deepest and other people are, never dive head-first, never jump on a big or rising swell, and never do it alone or after drinking. Most of the injuries here are from people jumping without looking at what they are jumping into.

Who wrote this

Written and photographed on Maui by Shane Perry. Every fee, rule, stall count and hazard on this site is checked against a primary source — the county, the state, the resort, the marker on the beach — before it goes on the page. Where the sources disagree, we say so instead of picking the one that reads best.

Last reviewed · July 2026 · Corrections welcome