Back to Volcanoes National Park

Linda found a couple more trails in the Volcanoes National Park that looked interesting, so we drove back up there again. We had been up once to look around, and another time to walk across the Kilauea Ike Crater.

This time we tried to climb down and walk across the Kilauea caldera itself.  The two caldera (craters) are separated by Byron Ledge. There is a trail to hike down to and across the Kilauea Ike Crater, and it turns out there is a separate trail (the Halema’uma’u trail) which takes you down into the Kilauea Crater itself.

The trail starts out pretty normal, but with more caution notices.

But there was clearly a lot of work done to create this path.

Some of the difficulties with the trail are the unstable nature of the crater itself.  It is the most active on the island.  Nothing much is going on now, but there are occasional earthquakes, which can cause the crater rim to shift, and cause rock slides that can cover the old trails and they have to be rebuilt or shifted.

Unfortunately, once we got down to the crater floor, the Park Service had closed off access to the crater floor.

We could walk out towards Byron Ledge, 

but that looked like more up and down and up again, so we turned around and went back up to the crater rim.  When we got up there, the signs indicated we could walk over to the Steam Vents (which we went to the first day) and the Sulphur Banks, so we did that.

The steam vents and sulphur banks operate on the same principle:  rain water seeps down cracks into the ground around the volcano.  In the case of the steam vents, the water does not go very far, gets heated up by underground hot rocks and converts to steam.  For the sulphur vents, the water goes much further down to actual magma and interacts with the much hotter magma, extracting sulfur from it and taking that sulfur back to the surface as sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.  (Sulphur is the English spelling of the American Sulfur, and when the vents were discovered, the British spelling was still being used, so the vents are called Sulphur Vents, but the chemical element involved is sulfur, for Americans.)

By this time, it was well past lunch time, so we went the the Volcano Lodge and ate at their restaurant, with a wall of windows overlooking the main caldera.

At lunch, we discovered yet one more hike/trail in the park — the Kipukapaulu trail.  That trail is outside the main park, so we drove over there.

The kipuka is a unique feature of the lava flows from the volcano.  Basically at one point, Mauna Loa was covered by a dense forest.  Then lava flows on the left and the right of the kipuka isolated it from everything else, a little bubble of dense forest in the middle of a bunch of lava.  Which makes it a good place to study the native plants of this part of Hawaii.

Unfortunately, things are never left alone, so various non-native plants also now grow in the kipuka.  And animals.  The Portuguese introduced some pheasants which thrived in the kipuka.  Of course, we didn’t see anything, until, as we left the trail, there was a female pheasant, and then a male, and then another and another female!  They just came out of the woods and onto the trail in our direction.

As we have driven across the Big Island, we kept seeing signs for Nene crossings.  The Nene is the Hawaiian Goose, and apparently it is not doing well.  First it prefers a particular altitude range on the mountains, and like much wildlife sometimes ends up as road kill.  So there are signs in the park, and along the Saddle Road, and other places about Nene crossings.  But we’ve never seen one.  We began to joke that it was a mythical Hawaiian bird.  

But there, by the side of the road near the kipuka, was a Nene.  Not just a Nene, but two Nene, and a chick:

We watched them for a while.  Linda took a video of them.

And then we went home.