Spring Break Day One: Rainy Volcano
By a strange twist of fate, a nearly unprecedented failure of Murphy's Law, Max and I have the same Spring Break! Needless to say, there's more than a few "sometime soon" trips that we've been saving up. The complication: a record-breaking run of heavy rains (I'm talking state-wide flash flood
and tornado warnings, thunderstorms, dam failures, sewage spills, etc.) of six weeks and counting, expected to continue at least to this weekend. Nonetheless, the first thing on Max's list was a hike in the Kilauea caldera, so...
| Here is the view from the Halemaumau overlook parking lot. The steam really does rise from the ground all over the place, and the cool, wet conditions highlighted the vents. There were a few vents close enough (or on) the path to allow us to feel the rising steam, and it really was steam! There's a definite sulpher smell around, too. |  |
| The Halemaumau crater is a small subcrater within the Kilauea caldera, the remains of an upflow from the early 1980s. | The crater is a bit over a mile across, and about 250 feet deep |
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| This is a close-up of the steam vents and floor inside the caldera from the overlook. It's hard to describe just how different this kind of landscape is. It's a different planet. It's certainly not earth, yet. |  |
 | This is a view of the 1984 flow field: it's still solid rock, unadorned by vegetation or wear after two decades. Most of what we were walking on was much older, with scrub grass and bushes (see below). When we got to this point on the trail, about a half-mile in, Max decided that we'd gone far enough. |
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 | One of the few plants growing in the caldera is 'Ohelo, a berry bush. Apparently it's one of the only things for the local endangered nene geese to eat, so there are signs all over telling us not to eat them. But at the supermarket later that day, I spotted some Ohelo-lilikoi-guava preserves. Haven't tried them yet. |
After we reached the edge of the new lava field, it was a bit hard to tell where the path was. I went ahead a bit anyway, just to scout. Max is wearing the rainshell that we bought in Seattle!
You can see the divide between the newer flow (foreground) and the older field (background). |  |
