Andy and Judy versus the Volcano

No trip to the Big Island is complete without going to see the Kilauea Volcano so we booked a helicopter ride with Safari Tours and headed off on a two hour drive to the Hilo airport. Along the way we stopped at Rainbow falls which is only about 4 blocks away from downtown Hilo.


Here we are with our little yellow life jackets, air sickness bags in hand (which thankfully no one tested out) ready to climb aboard and head off across the Macadamia nut fields to battle with the volcano.

We flew around the Pu'u'Oo Caldera which is a currently an active volcano spewing noxious fumes and sending hot lava through about 6 miles of underground tubes to the sea.

It was a really clear day and as we circled the crater you could see right inside to the bottom of the caldera and the multicoloured rock layers inside the rim. The crater is huge and at least 1 or 2 kilometers across.

The lava then flows through tubes just under the surface of previous flows which insulates the lava and allows it to flow all the way to the sea without cooling down much. In some areas the crust on top of the tubes collapses and you get round "windows" which let you see the red hot lave inside. The hole in the picture below would be big enough to fly the helicopter into, although I guess it would melt if you ever tried it! The picture hardly does justice to the red glow plainly visible in the midday Hawaiian sunshine.

At the end of the tube the lava flows into the sea in a big cloud of steam. This is where the island is growing day by day adding about 600 acres in the last few years.

After the helicopter tour we drove 45 minutes to the Volcano State Park and hiked about 4 kilometers around the top of the rim of the Kilauea Iki Crater which has a 100 year old lava lake at the bottom. You can actually hike across the floor of the crater but it was closed when we got there due to poor air quality because of the active vent seen on the far side of the crater which is about 2 miles across.

We then drove down the chain of Craters road to the ocean and hiked across roads covered by previous lava flows to get a view from the ground of the same lava flowing into the sea that we saw from the helicopter.

The lava covered the highway, destroyed hundreds of homes, acres of forests but enough warning was given to prevent any loss of life. We wanted to drive down highway 130 to the other side of the lava flow but the wind direction was unfavourable and viewing there was closed. The fumes really stink and can be very harmful and even fatal if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hiking across the lava is slow and tedious especially since the ground is very uneven and if you fall it is as sharp as glass (as Judy's knees can attest to!).

The next day we decided to drive up snow topped mount Mauna Kea which is 13,796 feet high but has roads all the way up to the telescope observatories at the top.

Sorry that we don't have any pictures of the last part of the gravel road, which wound steeply back and forth up the side of the mountain without guard rails, because Judy had her eyes closed and refused to look and I had both hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. For some reason everyone else there had a 4 wheel drive truck while we just drove up in our Chevy Cobalt compact car! At the top I made snowballs and played in the snow and was out of breath in 2 minutes. Above 13,000 feet there is not much oxygen and you can suffer from altitude sickness very quickly.

Someone else made a nice Hawaiian snowman and you can see the other mountain peak, Mauna Loa (13,677 feet high) in the background.

After our day on the mountain we drove back to the sea, lay out by the pool and watched the sunset to cap off a few more great days in the sun.