National Parks Service Launches Kalaupapa Hiking Tour

The NPS tour materials invite participants to step inside a historically preserved house. Photo by H. Schwalbe/NPS Photo

By Dayanti Karunaratne | Editor

This Friday marks an important date in the history of Kalaupapa: it’s the opening day for tour bookings operated by the National Parks Service. Online bookings for a guided hiking tour open at recreation.gov on June 26, with the first tour heading out, weather permitting, from the Kala’e trailhead around 7 a.m. on Thursday, July 9. 

Kalaupapapa National Historic Park Superintendent Nancy Holman said she wants to keep Molokai at the center of changes at the former leper colony. She says that’s why they are also bringing back a volunteer program. 

“When I listen at public meetings … people here on Molokai feel very strongly that they have been separated for too long from Kalaupapa,” Holman said. “And I also think, because of the story of Kalaupapa, it should feel like a community park to Molokai.” 

According to a National Parks Service press release, tours cost $20 and must be scheduled 24 hours in advance. They are available twice a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays. 

After a closure due to the pandemic, tours of Kalaupapa had resumed in late 2025. For a few months, Meli Watanuki, a patient and a resident of Kalaupapa, operated a bus tour of the various sites, and tickets sold out quickly. However, Watanuki passed away in May 2026, and her family recently shared the news that the operation would close down. 

National Parks policy and federal law state that patient residents be given the right of refusal — that is, first chance — at running tour operations.

Holman says no other patient residents were interested in taking on the tours. 

She said that some members of the wider community have voiced concerns about Parks doing interpretative tours, but says it’s an important part of their work. “To tell the story of this site that has been set aside — that is a requirement of us.”

According to Holman, NPS worked for years with Watanuki to put together her operation, and they’ve been working with the Department of Hawaiian Homelands for even longer on a transition plan. (Of the peninsula’s 10,000-plus acres, DHHL and DLNR are the biggest landowners.) Holman says they are following the Kalaupapa General Management Plan, which was developed from over 10 years of public consultation about the future of the park.

“One of the things about the General Management Plan, though, is that not everyone feels the same way about Kalaupapa,” Holman said. 

She says she wants residents to know there is a lot of room for local partnerships in the future. 

“I think it’s hard, even for me as a leader for the National Park Service down there, to remember that it’s not a one-and-done approach,” she said. “There’s a lot of pieces of the puzzle, and part of this trail experiment is to find out what we need to do to make it a successful, viable access route for visitors.” 

Holman says they are warning people about the terrain. “It’s not an easy day of hiking. It’s about 8 miles of walking, and there’s not a lot of shade.” Hikers will need to bring their own lunch and snacks, but they can fill up water bottles at the park. 

To answer questions about the tours, and spread the word about their new volunteer program, Holman and her team will be at Friendly Market from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday, June 26; they will have representatives at Grace Episcopal Church and the Molokai Public Library from 8 a.m. to 12 noon on Saturday, June 27.

In terms of volunteer tasks, she says weeding and trash pick-up are always needed, but there is also a stamp collection to be sorted and an adopt-a-building program in the works. 

“We really want to target people from Molokai,” said Holman. “We want to make sure that this feels like a local park for people of Molokai.”

Visit www.nps.gov/kala for more information on Kalaupapa National Historic Park.