Well... I woke up with a sore throat. Not terrible, could just be altitude, but Adam woke up with full-blown covid, so chances aren't great. We had a kinda slow morning, and then headed right back out to the crater, to see it in daylight.
It's even more massive than it looked at night. Apparently 2.5miles in diameter, 1600 feet deep.... and constantly changing. Only a few hundred years ago it was 200 feet above what's now the rim, and up until a few decades ago it was only 200 feet deep [My parents visited it 20 years and it was much smaller]. In the daylight, you can't see any lava, just smoke and steam vents, but you can see the small cindercones from the most recent eruption. And by small... the craters in the cindercones are 75 yards across. The sense of scale on this thing is all wrong. Also daytime visits mean you can talk to rangers! They were full of great stories, such as the 1791 eruption and pyroclastic flow deciding the war for king Kamehameha when it took out 2/3rds of his opposing army in a pyroclastic flow. Or the fact that the smooth section on the opposite crater wall was the parking lot from the old overlook, now fallen into the volcano.
Definitely impressive to see by the day, and the sheer volume of rise and collapse, acres of coverage, they're all on such different scales than I normally think of. A "small" eruption is still hundreds of thousands of tons. The 1983 eruption started with 2 million tons in 2 hours - and Hawaiian volcanos are low on the ejecta scale. In other mind-bending facts, the lava tubes can be so large and so self-insulating that lava will remain liquid within them for decades. In fact, one of the Hawaiian tubes was formed in 198x, and didn't empty until a fracture in 20xx [I was planning to look this up, but the internet has failed me. I did find another fun fact: Lava tubes have been discovered on Mars and even the moon!]
After checking out the overlook as we hit last night, and trying to take the same shots, we wandered up the hill to the other overlooks. The first was almost as good as the main overlook, and we got to watch clouds roll over the mountain and into the crater. The further overlook was pretty meh, with worse views, and then the clouds hit us, as sideways misty rain and a strong breeze. We set off towards the car, getting far too damp for comfort, but not enough to be actually wet. The van was covered with raindrops on the upwind side, with puddles around the tires, but perfectly dry and puddle-less on the leeward. (8 hours later, I now realize this is exactly what happens to the islands as well, which is why they're half rainforest and half desert)
Next stop, Thurston lavatube! But on the drive, we finally found a NeNe for my dad! He was the only one that hadn't seen them yet, and I explained my principle of "look for them doing stupid geese things" and we saw one on the side of the road. Having slowed down, we then saw them all over the parking lot for the on-park cabins. Doing stupid geese things. My dad was greatly relieved, lol.
From the same parking lot we took a quarter-mile hike the opposite direction through the rainforest, past huge ferns, palms, flowers, and other dinosaur-plants to the Iki crater overviews. Iki means small, but this crater was massive. Dumbfoundingly, they let you hike right on the lip. You can take a few steps off-trail, grab a tree-branch, and lean wayyyyy out there, at least 100' over where the crater wall begins to blend into the crater floor. Far below you, there is the old crater, (old meaning 1959 - this was the eruption that threw a curtain of lava 1900' in the air and gushed a million tons of lava/hour), which is over two miles long, and you can hike across the bottom! We could see people down there, the size of ants, making their way across. It' looks really cool, so we may do that, depends how people are feeling later.
We drove by Devastation Trailhead (for the old closed highway hike), and the Iki overview from the far side, but Sage was done with it, and we were all feeling a bit tired. Came back for lunch, and now it's naptime and I figured I'd write out the first half the day while it's fresh. See you soon.
...
So, post-lunch, Adam is burned out. I'm feeling better. Not free-and-clear, but better. So Mom, Dad, and I headed out to hit the rest of the park that's not on the Adam/Dani hitlist!
#1 - Steam / Sulfur vents. The steam vents are right on the rim of the volcano, giving them a great view into the crater, and some cool atmosphere. However, there's not much to see once you walk up to the vents.... just a hole with steam... they actually look better from a distance. But more cool views of the crater are always worth it, especially with such a short hike.
The sulfur vents were about a half-mile back from the crater, and with the "healthy" half of us already feeling kinda beat, it was a long half-mile. However, it was really cool to see how the vents would destroy the plants around them, leading to random dead-spots in an otherwise lush thicket. Getting back to the best-of-the-best sulfur vent, it had cleared out the whole area with it's toxic fumes, which didn't feel that toxic personally, and luckily the wind guided them generally away from us. I started considering how plants always fight their hardest to survive, even when dealt the worst hand possible... There's some poignant cosmic truth there, but I got distracted jumping over lesser hellscapes so don't ask me. Either way it was neat to see all the colors produced as they leached out, and we learned that we were still inside "the crater". The recent eruptions have been in a .5mi wide sub-crater in the big 2.5 mile crater, but there is yet another wall outside of that from an ancient eruption, several hundred yards outside of what we thought of as the lip.
Next we hit the visitors-center (which was very so-so) and watched the film "Hawaii: Born of fire. Born of Sea." This was exceptionally so-so, to the point where it was kinda funny. Remember the movie your parents taped on VHS off of broadcast television? And then you watched it weekly between the ages of 3 and 8? We didn't have any commercials, but otherwise that level of quality. And while it did have some cool moments (all 50 of Hawaii's finches and sapsuckers evolved from a few birds of a single breed, blown to the island) it was otherwise essentially a puff-piece for the park. Also, mosquitos only live in the puddles formed by wild hogs. None of the other water in the rainforest, just hog holes. Because of colonizers. Whatever. It was good to get off our feet and sit down for a while.
And feeling so recharged, we decided to go hiking again! We drove down to the far side of the crater to hike out the closed road (they had to close it when part of it fell into the crater). The hike was, as expected, long. I mean, not actually, it was like .8 out there, but we're all feeling rough. But we saw a NeNe in the wild! A nesting pair, eating traditional berries, and not looking like stupid geese for once. Back on subject, there was only one crack in the road that you were allowed to go to, and it was pretty minor. Like a poor-mans recreation of Centralia. But we walked down the side path to the crater, and that made it totally worth it.
Picturesque views of the crater, with the larger volcano as a back drop, and steamvents and such. Being on this side also offered much closer better views of the recent cindercones (omg that must have looked baller when they were going two weeks ago), the shelf dropoff from the last big collapse, and the highway that fell into the crater. You can actually look over and see a huge slab of desert with a highway going straight across it. Absolutely made the whole walk worth it. This is probably the best view of the crater. The walk back felt quicker, and when we got home, Dani was cooking spaghetti for all of us! I had a brief break laying on the floor with sage, and then we went out to the deck to eat (Adam was banished to his own table). We saw some turkeys? pheasants? walking by, and sage had her first noodles and sung to us. Great day.
 |
 |
Currently 7:30, we're all exhausted and half of us are asleep, but I might go out for another round of photography depending on the sky. I'll let you know what happened tomorrow!
Nevermind, it's raining. Won't say no to the sleep though.
No comments:
Post a Comment