We checked into our room, which we had reserved in the Ohia wing of the hotel. This wing is not located directly on the crater rim, so it has no view to speak of, and is less expensive. We didn't see the point in paying extra for a room we were only going to use for sleeping anyway. This is our normal mode of vacationing.
Since by now we were close to running out of daylight, and we had been cooped up in either a car or an airplane
for most of the day, we wanted to take a hike before dinner. Fortunately, there is a fascinating one that starts right
at the hotel and goes past many steam vents. This whole area has such a thin crust, that it is very geothermally active.
Steam is just gushing out of the ground in hundreds of places along this path.
When we got up close to these steam vents, Steffi's glasses would fog up, so we could only really appreciate them
from upwind.
As we followed the trail along the crater's rim, we could see into the crater, and appreciate
just how big it is. It is over three miles across and 400 feet deep. This kind of crater, called a caldera,
is formed when magma subsides leaving the ground unsupported.
We took a picture along the trail, and combined it with another one that we took from the
Hotel to form this double-sized portrait of Kilauea Caldera.
The floor is made up of blocks of cooled lava, and you can see steam escaping from
the floor of the caldera, just like the steam vents we were walking past.
In the distance, there is another crater within Kilauea itself. That is the Halema'uma'u crater, considered to
be the home of Pele, the goddess of the volcano. We enlarged this image to provide a better view.
By this time the trail had proceeded for enough around the rim to afford this view back at Volcano House.
After that we took the trail to the Sulfur Banks. This trail eventually goes back to the Hotel, so it formed a loop.
The Sulfur Banks are interesting. Before we got very close, we encountered this rather scary sign.
We did not fit any of the groups it was warning away, though, so we continued on. The banks are a hillside that is all yellow from the crystals of sulfur that form because of the high quantity of sulphurous fumes that escape along with steam at this spot. The smell of sulfur became strong, and then we found the banks.
We also found a pile of yellow rocks where sulfur was escaping, right next to the path.
It was almost dark now, so we walked back to the Hotel, feeling much better at having gone out for this hike
at the end of the day, and feeling much amazed at what we had seen so far. Tomorrow held much promise, as
we planned to hike down into the crater and get a closer look at things.
January 22: Kilauea
We planned to get started at dawn, but the weather again thwarted us. There was quite a bit of rain overnight, so we didn't get as early a start as we had planned. When we did get started it was misting pretty heavily, but this was one hike we were determined to take even if it rained. We had plenty of rain gear. Our plan was to drive a few miles around the rim to the Thurston Lava Tubes, where there is a path that leads down into Kilauea-Iki. Iki means "little," and Kilauea-Iki is actually a separate smaller crater, which is adjacent to Kilauea, almost as deep, and separated from it by a ridge named "Byron Ledge." Both calderas are active volcanoes, capable of erupting at any time, but there was little danger, because volcanoes like this generally give plenty of warning before changing their behavior.
We hiked down to the bottom, and took this picture of the
crater floor in the mist that was still falling. The crater floor is
most amazing. Because of the way that this lava cooled, it
consists of plates of cooled lava which are not flat,
but rather humped up in the middle and lower at the edges. Where the plates
join, you can often find ropes of black lava rock. This was caused when
molten lava squeezed up like toothpaste between the congealing plates.
It is quite extraordinary to see these black ropes that are actually
made out of rock. Another extraordinary part of the view here is that the lava
is much higher at the edges of the crater than the middle. This is the
"bathtub ring" effect, caused when the cooling lava retreated, lowering the
level of the crater floor after it had cooled around the edges.
We took a picture of Steffi in her rain gear here. Note the red hat.
That is a prized possession, a Gore-Tex hat that provides marvelous protection against the rain.
You can see the cairns used to mark the Kilauea-Iki Trail across the crater floor, but for
a better picture of Steffi, we provide this enlargement.
After crossing the crater to the other side, we scrambled up the "bathtub ring" portion of lava to reach the trees at the base of Byron ledge. We climbed this forested hill, and when we reached the top and looked over the other side of it, the sun came out, producing a spectacular rainbow over the much larger crater of Kilauea.
Our hike then took us down to the floor of Kilauea Crater, and we
crossed a small section of it. The trail stayed close to the edge, and passed directly below a huge
rockslide which we learned to be the result of a large earthquake that struck in 1983,
dropping large portions of the crater rim into the crater, including a portion of the Waldron
Ledge parking lot, which was somewhere in this pile. The trail then climbed up 400 feet to reach the rim,
right at Volcano House. We still had a few miles of hiking along the edge of the rim to get back to the car.
We hiked along the road to Waldron Ledge, which is now closed because portions of it were dumped over the edge
into the crater.
We went through the Thurston Lava Tubes, which was fun. They are lit, but there is a section at the end which is left in its natural state (pitch black) and which we were prepared to explore with our flashlights, which we did. We also drove around Crater Rim Road and hiked on Desolation Trail, which now shows the biological recovery following the devastation that was wreaked when Kilauea-Iki erupted in 1979. We also took this picture from the parking lot of Devastation Trail. It shows a full view of Kilauea-Iki Caldera. You can follow the trail that we had taken in the morning, across the middle of it.
Our next activity was to drive the Chain-of-Craters Road, which goes towards the Pacific Ocean for about 20 miles, dropping all 4000 ft. of elevation. It goes past Lua Manu Crater, Puhimau Crater, Ko'oko'olau Crater, Pauahi Crater, etc. etc. Hence its name. We stopped at many of these, and they were all interesting, but we didn't take pictures, because they were too similar to what we had seen before.
After a while the Pacific became visible in the distance. The descent was rather gradual, but towards
the end the road has to switch back in order to get past a cliff (Holei Pali) and reach the Ocean. The waves
of the Pacific ocean crash hard against vertical walls of black lava rock here. There is no way to get down to the shore,
and in fact, there is no real shore to get down to.
The road turns east and follows the coastline. We stopped at the Holei Sea Arch and took this picture of the
natural arch that the wave action had formed there. Then we came to the end of the road. The road used to continue
out of the National Park and connect to the highway system, but now the way is blocked by a lava flow. We had to
turn around and park by the side of the road. Note the picture of the end of this road.
Once we parked we walked past the end of the road and out onto the lava. The path is very uneven, and the lava is sharp, so you have to be very careful not to fall. After we went a few hundred yards, we had a great view in the distance of the point where the lava is still flowing, and falling into the ocean, making great clouds of steam.
This is the East Rift Zone, and lava has been flowing here continuously for the last 17 years.
The eruption began in 1983. The Source of the Lava is the
Puu Oo vent of Kilauea, ten miles east of the main Kilauea Crater. It flows down the slope for miles, mostly covered
by the cooled crust of its lava tube, and finally dumps into the ocean here. At various times during this long eruption,
the actual path of the lava has varied, and a few years ago was responsible for demolishing the town of Kalapana,
outside the park, producing millions of dollars in damage.
We could not see any hot lava, only the effects of it. While there was a lot of steam in this area, there was also a
funny-looking brownish cloud over the hillside. We finally smelled it and realized that it was smoke,
caused by the burning off of vegetation by the lava flow. This picture shows it as a bluish haze in front of the pali
that the lava had just traversed. It was frustrating, though, that we couldn't actually see the lava itself.
Here is a picture of Steve, pointing out the structures of the ropy lava here of the type called pahoehoe. This lava is fairly recently deposited, and so it is very sharp. In fact Steve cut just the outer skin of his finger (no blood) by touching the lava while posing for this.
We returned up Chain-of-Craters Road, stopping at various places, including one parking lot where we saw our first Nene.
Nene are native Hawaiian geese. They love to beg for food in parking lots, but are often killed by cars. Feeding them
is expressly forbidden, since it encourages them to put themselves in harm's way. A Park Ranger saw these two Nene
about the same time we did, and was going to shoo them away, but she allowed us to take a picture (a permitted activity)
before doing so.
Before dinner, we asked a Park Ranger at the Visitor Center what our chances would be of seeing hot lava if we returned to the end of the road after dark. We were surprised to hear that our chances were excellent, and the ranger in fact practically guaranteed it. So we had dinner at the hotel restaurant (again) and then retraced our path to the end of the road at night. We saw the dull red glow on the hillside long before we reached the end. When we walk out on the lava again, using flashlights this time and going even more carefully than we did in the afternoon, we were treated to the most amazing sight of the hillside where we had seen the smoke now appearing as if it were all on fire.
We really wanted to take a picture of this, but this was going to be a difficult picture to take. For one thing, the light
did not register enough on the camera's light meter to give us any clue what exposure to use. We needed the long focus lens,
but we also needed an extremely long exposure, and the combination is deadly for camera movement. To make things worse,
we didn't have either a tripod or a cable release. We bracketed the exposure, but only the really long one (4 seconds)
came out with any usable image. Thankfully the film was pretty fast (ASA 400) or we would have come up empty.
We did our best to brace the camera using rocks to avoid jitter, and although we had a number of artifacts in the resulting
image, including some inevitable jitter during the exposure, it cleaned up fairly well using digital filters. The result gives you
a very good idea of what we actually saw that night. It's the most extreme picture we've ever taken, so we're proud of it.
Note that the column and cloud of smoke is clearly visible in the light of the glowing lava flows.
We also tried to get a picture of the lava falling into the sea at night too. It was impressive to view, because the steam cloud was lit only by the glow of the lava, but the image was more dynamic, and the long-exposure picture that we took came out as little more than a blur.
This story continues with our travels in the rest of the big island in the next chapter.
The pictures and text are all Copyright © 2000, Steven R. Weiss. All rights reserved.