Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

 Hawaii is a chain of volcanic islands, and the Big Island is the latest set of volcanos.  Mauna Loa is the most active volcano.  There have been a number of major lava flows from Mauna Loa in modern times, most recently just December 2022.  Hawaii Volcanoes National Park includes a lot of the land around Mauna Loa.  

So our first full day on the Big Island, we decided to visit the park.  It took us a while to get from our room on the east side of the island over and down to the park, getting there around noon.  There are two main roads in the park.  Crater Rim Drive (West and East) goes along the Kilauea Caldera, one of the more recent craters.  We started with that.


Although there is no active lava in the caldera, it is clear that things are still active.  There are steam vents around the caldera where  steam comes out of the ground.


We continued to drive around the caldera.  We could get pretty good views down into the crater.


At one point, they have opened up a lava tube that you can walk thru. 


The bright spots are just the end of the lava tube and a flash light by another couple walking thru the lava tube.

There is another spot where you can walk around a cinder cone formed in a 1974 eruption, the Devastation  Trail.

which was just a pile of cinders and rocks.


If you continue along Crater Rim Drive East, it turns into Chain of Craters Road, which winds past lots of old lava flows and craters associated with them all the way down to the Pacific Ocean, where there is the Holei Sea Arch.


And on the way back from that there is a trail over to the Pu`uloa Petroglyphs, where native people carved designs on the volcanic rocks.  It’s a significant hike from the road


But you can get up close to some interesting designs.


It was after 5:00 by the time we left the park and headed back to a meal and our rooms.

But if you go back to the picture of the caldera bottom, before the lava tubes and look real closely, you might notice there are people down there in the crater walking from one side to the other.  That seems like an interesting thing to go back for!

Oh, also, we noticed that we have no cell phone service (so no calls or texts) at our rooms.  We do have Wi-Fi, tho, so we can do e-mail and access the web.  Some places we can get cell phone service, but not in a lot of the park, or here where we are staying.


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