Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

After driving through it for an hour we were stunned by how clear the sky was when we emerged from the fog at 10pm and 4,000 feet, where our house was. The stars were fantastic. I was dead tired from doing so much that day but i knew after i had a shower and a beer that i would regret it if i didn't go to see what the crater looked like. The picture above is the result of forcing my tired ass to go back outside instead of crawling into bed. The illuminated crater is 3/4 of a mile wide and sits inside another crater an additional 2 miles wide. In the bottom of the even smaller crater is an open pool of boiling lava, emitting deadly amounts of sulfur dioxide. This is Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Down by the ocean amid a surreal landscape of utter destruction, cooling flows of lava have collided to form a chain of plates like dragons back. The area was previously a neighborhood. In the distance lava burns through a forest on it's way towards the sea.

A bottle wrapped in taro leaves is left as an offering to gods on the edge of Pauahi Crater. The crater was last active in the early 1970's, and is just one of many on the Chain of Craters road, the main route through the park.

Kiluea crater is the centerpoint for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and has been continuously active since the 1980's. Currently though, most of the destructive lava is pouring out of Pu'u 'O'o about 12 miles to the East. The park also includes the summit and high southwestern flanks of Mauna Loa, which is the most massive volcano on Earth and last erupted in 1984.

I found the birthplace of H.R. Giger. Can you find the skull?

Part of a high lavafalls. Must have been an awesome site, except that you'd be dead.

The road drops down off the lava shield and into the new lowlands. The lighter color is Pahoehoe and is the psychedelic melted wax type of lava as in the waterfall above. The darker brown lava is A'a and is a brutal pile of sharp jagged pumice. How it turns out depends on the temperature of the flow and the chemical makeup. Below you can see the two types from the bottom looking up.

A few of the infinite interesting forms of Pahoehoe.

The portions of the park around 4,000 feet, if not destroyed by lava, are an incredibly lush rainforest. I was really happy to see Fern Trees all over the place. I had thought you had to go to New Zealand to see those.

The entrance to Thurstan Lava Tube is just on the other side of the road from one of the Kilauea Iki viewpoints.

The visitor portion of the tube is very short, not much more than what you can see here. It then emerges out of a collapsed ceiling. Intrepid rebels could climb through the railing and explore much farther if they were prepared and arrived before the endless stream of buses, the first of which were pressing up behind me with relentless force.

A closeup of one end of Kilauea crater. The ground is covered in sulfur, but in the background you can see a road. That is the Crater Rim Drive, and is closed due to elevated levels of Sulfur Dioxide. I was pretty disappointed by that because the road has some spectacular views and is the starting point of several hiking trails. I asked a ranger when the road might be open (i know it's a dumb question) and he said cynically: "Not in your lifetime."

Down in the lowlands we went on a mile hike out to some interesting petroglyphs. There were many others within easy viewing distance.

No way. Really? Is it?

It was like Road Warrior meets The Blob.

The road is destroyed down along the ocean front. Originally it continued all the way to the town of Pahoa.You can walk over the flow for as long as you want until it comes out the other side 10 miles away. Along the way you can find patches where the road is still exposed.

Some of the newest land on Earth. Currently the volcano is beating back the ocean. Because The Big Island is so new, it doesn't have as many beaches as the other islands.

Part II: The Search for Hot Lava

My number one goal on the island of Hawaii was to see some hot lava close up. Unfortunately during the time we visited the lava was right about in the middle of both ends of the buried road, making it a 4 to 6 mile walk across a post nuclear wasteland. To make things worse, a team of shady teamster type guys, one of them from Amsterdam, blocked our path when we first set out, telling us with smirks that weren't allowed to go there because "of private property" issues. Their arguments didn't hold water though, because we were walking along buried public highway. 

 This is the top of a schoolbus buried in the lava flow.

The Puna district has a long history of shady dealings, those guys sitting in chairs were just the tip of the iceberg. In 1958 two Denver businessmen set up a corporation called Tropic Estates, Ltd.. With the cooperation of local politicians they set up a very successful real estate scheme modeled after the infamous Florida swampland real estate scam. Many people bought the 1 acre lots without ever seeing them. Unadvertised and unknown to the buyers were little facts like the lots being 12 miles downslope from an active volcano, often on wasteland, with no water, sewer, or electric services, on roads not maintained by the county, and in areas that were uninsurable. The Royal Gardens neighborhood was the most famous of these subdivisions and just this past winter the last houses were destroyed by lava. Much of the land, although sold, was never even developed. It's an interesting story, and you can read more about it HERE.

So it was really idiotic to have two guys telling you you couldn't go somewhere due to property issues (unless they didn't want you to wander into a marijuana grow operation, which Puna is also famous for). More likely though, it had to do with the large billboard they were literally sitting next to. The sign was for a "guide" company that would take you to the lava, for a hefty fee. After some circular arguing where i pointed out that the Federal park rangers told us a specific route to take to the lava from this very point, i gave up and we decided to start off via another road, which unfortunately set us back by a mile or two from where we had been originally.

 Some extra metallic lava that seemed newer than the stuff around it.

The second location, at the end of the Kapoho Kalapana Road, had a Road Warrior vibe going on. A dozen denizens closely watched us from a high bank as we parked and unloaded our car. There was a "donation" box at the parking lot, so i obliged and made sure all those guys saw me. I kinda felt like the donation was a toll to prevent a break in.

Having to drive somewhere else and restart farther back definitely ate up a lot of time and it was clear that at our rate of speed we weren't going to get anywhere near the lava, which you could see burning off in the distance.  Instead we stopped and explored some of the weird destroyed townsite we had been hiking over. In places you could see where houses had been overtaken by the lava, then burned underneath, causing the top of the lava to collapse into a shallow pit. In cracks you could see the foundations of some of them. One depression contained partially melted swingset. Metal roofs survived in other areas. It was all very apocalyptic.

After some distance into our trek we came across a vast area of tree branches. It looked like the lava had engulfed a forest and all the leaves and bark had burned off. But by the time the tree trunks burned away the lava surface had cooled, and the upper branches rested where they fell. The impression was that we were walking through a dead forest canopy that was lying on the ground.

This was as close as we got, still several miles away. The lava would glow brightly at times, and at others disappear.