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Tuesday was Volcanoes National Park day. We got up early, did our 3 mile run from Sea Village down to the Triathlon Swim Start, showered, ate a fast breakfast, then drove 3 hours South from Kona to get to the park. En-route, we stopped at South Point - the southernmost part of the island and the southernmost part of the United States. Here's a picture of Wendell playing with the GPS to determine our Latitude and Longitude. |
| Hobbit did a little rock climbing (without a rope.) |  |
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We drove to the Volcano National Park (http://www.nps.gov/havo) and with to the Jaggar Museum. This is a photo across the Halema'uma'u Crater at the Halema'uma'u Overlook (you can see the tour busses in the distance.) The yellow patches in the crater are sulfur. |
| We drove to the Halema'uma'u Overlook and snapped a picture of this tour bus - we decided that if you're in a tour bus, you're not really having an adventure. |  |
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We saw a bunch of warning signs, so we decided to snap a picture of Hobbit standing next to one. We are assembling quite a collection of "Hobbit standing next to a warning sign" pictures. |
| We drove to the Thurston Lava Tube parking lot and started the 4 mile hike down, through and around the rim of the Kileau Iki crater. The crater is semi-active - it was belching steam while were hiking through it. This is a picture from the rim of the crater. |  |
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This is a picture after we hiked down 400' of altitude into the crater floor. You can make out the path as a lighter gray across the plain of lava rock. |
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The trail was marked at periodic intervals by stacks of lava rocks. This is to keep people from wandering off into areas where the lava crust is too thin - it's possible to break through the crust and fall into the lava. Hobbit wrote an email to her mother later in the week, "We did the four mile walk down into the crater. Now I know what it feels like to be in a giant fireplace." |
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This is a view across the crater floor at an upheaval of lava that was belching steam all afternoon - the path ran right next to it. |
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This is as close as we got to the steaming upheaval of lava. |
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Hobbit approaches a steam vent that's belching steam intermittently. |
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Hobbit says, "Hey, Wendell - come feel this, it's warm!" |
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Wendell says, "Hobbit, are you certain that you want to climb on that? It's belching scalding hot steam ..." |
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We finished our hike through the crater, then climbed up the rim and shot a photo back along our path. From here, we hiked around the rim to our starting point. |
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After we finished with the crater, we went into the Thurston Lava Tubes. The Parks Department has some of the tube lit with lights, however there's a section that you can go into that doesn't have lights. We, of course, had to go visit it. The photo that we took turned out almost completely black, however a little work with Photoshop gives you an idea of the contours of the cave wall. We had to hurry, though ,because it was getting dark outside and we wanted to go see the lava! |
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It was a bad week for lava viewing because the molten lava has crusted over - this meant that you couldn't see any glowing lava at night and, during the day, if you were to wander into the wrong area, you ran the risk of accidentally breaking through the crust and winding up knee deep in molten lava. After it got dark, We went out to the end of the "safe zone" to watch lava pouring into the sea. The rangers set up the safe zone about 1 mile away from where lava was pouring into the ocean - from there we could see billowing clouds of steam illuminated a dim red from below by the molten lava. From the end of the "safe zone" we could also see some pools of molten lava up on the hillside about 1/2 mile away. As we looked through our binoculars up the hillside at the tiny pools of glowing lava, we were amused to see several idiots that were in the out of bounds area - walking within a few yards of the pools of lava. We were hoping to see one of the idiots burst into flames, but alas none did. About 20 years ago, the lava had poured over a local town and we were walking on the top of the remains of the town and the lava bed covering it. On our walk back, we saw a glimmer of reclection from the lava field, so we walked over to see what it was. We found this No Parking Sign which had been buried in lava - we figure that the lava is about 8 feet deep at this point. I snapped several photos of Hobbit standing next to this no parking sign and pieced them together with photoshop. |