5:41 HST - Volcano, Hawaii
Day two is wrapping up -- I'm back at the house, getting ready to do some macaroni and cheese, kidney beans, an potatoes for dinner.
I was woken up early (like 4:30 AM) this morning by a text from a girl back in Colorado. I forgot about the time difference, and so didn't think to turn my phone to vibrate, so the obnoxious text message tone I have set screaming "I'M FRESH" in my ear snapped me awake. I couldn't really fall back asleep after that, so I drifted into the kitchen and had a few cups of coffee and scrolled through tumblr. Hawaiian coffee, by the way, is awesome. I didn't really expect that when I left on this adventure; "can't wait to get to Kona, I hear the coffee's pretty good." But certainly a pleasant surprise.
After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits, Morningstar vegetarian sausage, and apple slices with sharp white cheddar, I left for Volcanoes National Park. The visitors' center kind of planned out my day from there. Drove through the thick tropical forest on Chain of Craters road, which eventually traversed down from the mountain elevation into a plain at sea level. The plain, and a lot of the forest on the way, actually, was flattened by huge expanses of black igneous rock that shined golden in the sunlight. I walked from the car at a designated point along the asphalt path to a point called "End of the Road," which is where Chain of Craters had been overrun in the 1970s (I think) by lava flowing from one of the nearby volcanoes.
Five volcanoes make up "the big island" -- Kohala, Mauna Kea, Hualalai, Mauna Loa, and Kilauea. Only the latter three are active, and Kilauea has been erupting continuously since 1983.
Hiking around the solidified flows from the different eruptions was an effort, because the terrain is so unexpectedly shaped. A lot of the lava hardened in the shape it flowed in, which means bulbous and bubbly and twisted shapes all over the place. On the return trip, I took stops along the way, the first of which was in the same plain, but between two of the larger flows. There was a .7 mile hike from the road to the Pu'u Loa petroglyphs -- carvings of different shapes in the rocks by ancient Hawaiians.
Petroglyphs are similar to hieroglyphs in that they both use images as a linguistic tool; the difference is that hieroglyphs use images as an alphabet, while petroglyphs use images to be the language itself.
A brief venture onto the Napau path to Pu'u Huluhulu was cut short by a rapidly increasing rainfall. This was midday, so I sought lunch at a pseudo-cafe by the house. By the time I returned to the park, the rain had been consistently inconsistent, falling or ceasing at a moment's notice. Took Crater Rim Drive to the Devastation trailhead, and hiked that (something like .6 miles of paved path through the jungle) to an overlook of the Kilauea Iki crater, which was, at one point, filled with a lake of lava, and still leaks steam from rainwater seeping down into cracks in the surface. The scale of it was actually one of the coolest parts. In the past century, that puppy has erupted with jets of lava up to 540 meters high. That's like, taller than the Taipei 101 tower (formerly the tallest building in the world, until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai).
I went from there to the Thurston Lava Tube, and walked through that. The tunnel is now actually unimpressive because the floor has been paved flat and there are even drainage grills throughout, which I think thoroughly detracts from how cool I imagine it must've been when originally formed. Lava tubes like that form when the top layer of a lava flow hardens -- in the same way that ice forms over a river -- and then insulates the lava below, so it stays hot. When the eruption is complete, lava will drain from beneath the hardened layer, leaving huge tunnels in its wake.
A quick hike past some more overlooks of the huge Kilauea summit caldera led back to the Jeep, and then after a few stops at the Jaggar Museum (to look at the Halema'uma'u Crater inside Kilauea caldera), at some steam vents nearby, and then at the general store closest to the house, I returned home, and now dinner.
8:23 MST - Volcano, Hawaii
I just got back from returning to the Halema'uma'u overlook. A park ranger recommended viewing it at night -- for the sake of "the glow." During the day, Halema'uma'u (not sure what the correct way to abbreviate that is, otherwise I would) just looks like a huge column of steam rising from a crater, because you can't actually see the lava from the overlook. However, when it's dark out, the red-hot glow from the lava is visible, and it really feels like you're looking at a real volcano. Unfortunately, it's at night, and you're far away, so cameras leave a lot to be desired. Day two down!
