Puʻu Loa Petroglyphs

Stay on the boardwalk. Do not touch the carvings. Do not make rubbings — the abrasion damages the rock. Do not stack stones anywhere in the area. Most importantly, do not leave anything in the cupules — the small drilled holes you can see are not visitor offering bowls. Each one held the umbilical cord stub of a specific named child whose family dug that hole; the descendants of those children are alive today. The site is sacred to the people of Kalapana, the village destroyed by lava in 1990; their ancestral connection to this place is direct.