Volcano, HI to Hilo, HI

Last summer we filled ourselves from the breakfast buffet at Glacier (twice!), Yellowstone, and Grand Teton National Park Lodges. Now it was time to continue the streak at Volcanoes! It was similar in quality to the mainland versions, but additionally had a chef making custom omelettes to order. And they charged us the cheaper staying-at-the-lodge rate, I realized in retrospect, perhaps because they assume anyone who shows up to breakfast before the doors open must have just stumbled down from their room. But we had places to go and things to see!

Breakfast at Volcanoes National Park Lodge, looking out onto the Kilauea Crater. The prime-positioned lodge reminded me of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, where you walk in the “front” of the building, and then through big windows at the “back”, suddenly see the main attraction revealed that had been hidden until then by the building itself.

Yesterday was mostly gasoline-powered, but today would be fully breakfast-powered, as we would walk most of the park’s remaining front-country trails that we hadn’t hit yesterday. Leaving the truck in its prime parking spot at the lodge, we took a trail that brought us quickly down into the main crater. Initially routing us through a lush forest, the only indication that we were inside a volcano was the sheer 400-foot cliff to our left that could be glimpsed through the trees.

A forest inside Kilauea’s crater, with the crater wall visible behind.

The ferns are always ready to play their own funeral dirge, evidenced by their fiddleheads at the ready.

These fern-parts looked like steel garden stakes.

Then for no particular reason the forest came to an abrupt end and left us exposed on the black floor of the crater. Well, there is another (much-deeper) hole within our hole, but we were still definitely inside an active volcano, as evidenced by the fact that a park road that once ran on the rim above now lives in pieces somewhere down at our level. You could once walk all the way to the rim of Halemaumau (that much-deeper hole with in this hole), but due to sulfur dioxide and volcanic risk, we’re now kept at least a mile away.

Rett standing in the crater of an active volcano. There were strange sounds here, like water running under the rock, that we could never quite figure out.

After a short stretch on the bare lava rock, we ascended again to the crater rim, only to soon drop down into a separate, secondary crater, Kilauea Iki. This one erupted in 1959, and big crowds of people got to see it tossing huge amounts of fire high into the air. Now it forms a perfect flat-bottomed bowl whose desolation you can walk across.

Rett descending into Kilauea Iki, and looking at the path across its bottom.

The red-flowering o’hia is one of the first plants to grow in new lava flows, as seen here in front of a still-gaping hole in the earth. It is in fact a relative of the New Zealand “Christmas Tree”, or pohutukawa, though apparently with much less-seasonal flowering in this location.

From high on the rim, the bottom looks dead-flat, but here you can see the pillowy forms that the lave fluffed into as it cooled (the cliff at the top edge is the “bathtub ring”, which reveals that the entire center of the lava lake dropped 50 feet after it cooled.

Quick, get out of the volcano before it blows again!

Halfway across Kilauea Iki; luckily it was cloudy/hazy when we did the crossing, because in the sun it would have been pretty brutal crossing this black desolation.

Hey, no one told us they have manta rays here too, and here they let you ride on their backs!

Life finding a way as it always does, though this now-65-year-old lava lake shows it is still far from being overtaken with green.

Now climbing up to the rim on the opposite side, we can see the “trail” behind us, lava rock slightly-smoothed by thousands of feet (the eroded bits then also collect as lava “sand” in little hollows near where people walk).

A kalij pheasant (and their mate) crossed the trail on our way out of the crater (the crater sides are covered in forest the whole way around).

Kilauea Iki crater seen from the top again, with Mauna Loa behind.

Climbing out of the far end of Kilauea Iki then brought us right to the overflowing parking area for the Nahuku Lava Tube (pfft, who would drive to such a thing?! Not us! (at least not today)).

The jungle entry into the lava tube might have been the best part.

Ok, the tube itself was pretty cool too. Huge, and it continued further past the steps that took us out, but that’s all we’re allowed to explore.

The final stage was the return to Volcano House lodge, high on the rims of both Iki and Kilauea proper. At one point the trail uses the former park road which is now closed because a section of it collapsed into the crater. It felt extremely The Walking Dead to be walking on this long-ago-closed strip of decaying asphalt, with the jungle rapidly attempting to reclaim it. The best part was the pull-out parking area, which still has all the striped parking spots, but hasn’t seen a car in ages. Just another example of the impudence of man to build anything in this land of fire and violence.

The Kilauea Caldera. The foreground black is the level we were walking on earlier, and the background is the deeper (and far-more-active) Halema’uma’u crater.

Closer in on Halema’uma’u crater, which seems reasonably settled, despite the steam rising. Thus it’s really difficult to grasp that in 2018 (like, well into this 21st century!), a giant collapse dropped the floor that you see here down 1600 feet!! And then in 2021, a new lava lake erupted and raised the floor 750 feet back up!! In geological terms, the damn thing is a high-speed elevator gone haywire!

Here’s what happens to a National Park road sign if the road is no longer a road and is being reclaimed by the jungle.

When we had been riding the bikes, we roughly assumed that we’d spend three nights camping at Namakanipaio Campground, because we’d arrive one night, explore the park the next two days, and then depart for Hilo after our third night. But traveling with gasoline power allowed us to get to the park early enough on the first day to do some exploring even before our first night, and now on our second “full day”, we realized that there was no reason to sleep atop the volcano for another night when we could easily finish the hour-long drive down to Hilo well before dark. Plus, there were no showers at the campground (well, there sort of are, but that bathhouse is locked with a code only given to the cabin-dwellers!), so the ability to return to Bob & Paloma’s house rather than spend a third unshowered night in our sleeping bag sure sounded attractive!

It rained most of the way down the 4000-foot hill, so what I had assumed would be an “easy” downhill bike ride certainly wouldn’t have been as fun as I’d thought, at least if we had done it this afternoon.

Volcano, HI to Hilo, HI

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