Quest For Fire

Three years ago, my friends Larry and Rachel went to Hawaii. Larry went for business; Rachel tagged along and turned it into a vacation. They ended up getting married, which was a surprise to everyone who knew them, even if it was a long time coming. I got the news at a seemingly impromptu happy hour with some of our closest friends when they got back home. The discussion that day over beers and a couple of fireballs (as I remember) was all about the wedding and marriage. How did you do it? When did you know you were going to do this? How did you get a dress? And on and on and on.

And all that was well and good, but I wanted to know something else about their trip: "Did you go to Volcanoes National Park?" After all, what the heck else was there to do in Hawaii? The response to my question? "We didn't go to The Big Island." Now at that time, I didn't really know what to do with that answer. I didn't know what The Big Island was and I didn't understand how you could go all that way and not go to a place where you could possibly see lava flowing into the sea and creating new land. Did you read that? Lava flowing!!! But apparently they didn't go. Either that time or the second time they went a few months later. But enough picking on my friends.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post on this blog about how un-cool I was as a kid and how I never really wanted to go to Hawaii. Turns out that's not exactly completely true. Yes, the un-cool part was right. No doubt there. But the not wanting to ever visit Hawaii was not true because for a few years now I've really really wanted to visit Volcanoes National Park. So not surprisingly, this place was the cornerstone of my vacation plan to the islands. No matter what else got in my way, no matter how much it cost, no matter how long it took to get there, if I was going to visit Hawaii, I was going to visit Volcanoes. And hopefully, God willing (although it might not be my god) see some lava flowing.

Dead white trees still standing, presumably frozen in time by a lava flow.

According to ancient Hawaiian legend, Volcanoes National Park is home to Pele, the goddess of fire, lightning, wind and volcanoes. She lives in the Halema'uma'u Crater at the summit of the volcano Kilauea which is part of Mauna Loa, the smaller of the two 13,000 foot plus peaks that dominate The Big Island. She is there because she was driven out of her homeland of Tahiti by her sister Na-maka-o-kaha'i, the goddess of water. Something about Pele seducing her sister's husband or something like that. Hawaii, as it turned out, had the first peak high enough for Pele to escape her sister's reach from the ocean. So she stopped and stayed.

Pele was perhaps the most revered and feared of the ancient Hawaiian gods because to the people of the islands, she made her power and anger obvious every time Kilauea erupted, which it did frequently enough to make people remember she was there. When she was not erupting and causing mass destruction, there were very often small flows of lava on the mountain or a bubbling lake of molten rock that glowed orange in the night to remind everyone of her wrath. It's no surprise that she was one of the last ancient gods to be abandoned after Christianity spread through the islands.

We arrived at Pele's home on day four of our Hawaiian trip, having flown over that morning on a 35 minute or so island hopper flight from Oahu. About the entire length of the flight later, we had de-planed; made our way through the airport; picked up our car; and were heading upwards from the shore in our not-very-powerful-at-all Nissan Versa Note excited to hopefully come face to face with Pele for the very first time. We hit the Park after about a  45 minute drive from Hilo airport.

First stop: the Kilauea Visitor Center to get a park map and a lay of the land and to plan our day. Volcanoes National Park is divided into two sections: a limited access upper section that covers the peak of Mauna Loa and the Moku-aweoweo Caldera, and a lower section focused on the Kilauea Caldera about halfway between the top and the Pacific Ocean. We spent an entire day and night (electing to splurge for the Volcano House hotel in the Park) in the lower section which is where most visitors spend their time. A day here is great; seeing most of everything is totally possible in 24 hours without being rushed in any way.

We got the bad news about as soon as we set foot in the visitor center: there was nowhere in the park that you could see flowing lava on the day we visited. I was crushed. I felt like I did when I went to see the northern lights in Iceland, or more accurately did not see the northern lights in Iceland. Time to make the best of it anyway, I guess.

Me standing on the 1974 lava flow.

Heading out of the Kilauea Visitor Center, we had two choices: continue straight on the road towards the crater itself or head back out of the park a little and hang a right towards the Chain of Craters Road, a winding two lane road that would take us right down to the ocean. Because we knew we wouldn't see any lava near the crater (or anywhere else for that matter), we took the road to the sea, figuring by the time we got back, the day tourists might be cleared out a little.

This was a great choice. The roundtrip drive is about 38 miles. It took us four hours. We didn't expect it would take that long but almost every minute of it was completely worthwhile, starting about thirty minutes into the trip. 

Immediately surrounding the Kilauea Caldera is a rainforest, a lush tropical canopy with chirping calling birds that you look for in the palm trees but just can't quite make out despite them repeatedly making the same noise so you can hone in on them. It's pretty and unlike any sort of forest you can find near my home near Washington, D.C. and it's good for a quick hike or two. We stopped in part of the rainforest on the way down to walk through a lava tube, a hollowed out rock tunnel caused by an old underground lava flow, and on the way back up the mountain to try to find some of the elusive nene, the ground-dwelling goose-like bird that is the state bird of Hawaii. We came up empty on this second quest.

But it's when we cleared the rainforest that the drive got really interesting for us and it was totally unexpected. The terrain after the rainforest is drier but still green (albeit a lot paler), made up of grasses and small shrubs and trees that looks a lot less hospitable than the rainforest but still live-able. Until you get to the site of a 1974 lava flow, a probably quarter mile wide stripe of devastation cutting from the right side of the road to the left and down on to the ocean. The landscape in this location is nothing but black rock and it's clear from the lack of vegetation anywhere within the flow 42 years later that the destruction was complete. It was shocking to see this and quite honestly completely awe-inspiring. Any time I get a hint of the true power of mother nature, I'm impressed. As long as I'm not in the way, I suppose.

The 1974 flow is worth a stop and a little walk over the hardened lava just to think about what it would have been like to see and feel a river of lava this big flowing over the land to the ocean, cutting down anything in its path. God forbid you were anywhere near this thing when it was moving; it must have been terrifying. And 42 years is not that long ago. The current Chain of Craters Road passes right through the flow, having been chiseled out of the lava to allow tourists like me to see it and move beyond, which we did.

Greenish and black striped landscape showing the path of past lava flows.

The 1974 flow is not the last or the most recent you'll pass by or through on your way to the water. This volcano has been very active over the last few centuries and you can see flow after flow of hardened lava as you move downhill. It's a landscape of stripes of barely surviving vegetation interspersed with shimmering cracked cooled molten rock that now looks like the top of brownies that you pull fresh out of the oven (I'm not kidding; there's no other way to describe it). And it's pretty amazing to see the path of each flow when you are at the bottom of the hill looking up towards the top. It gives you a great view of just how tenuous life is in that sort of a location and how quickly it could be wiped out.

But for sure life existed down here, including people a long long time ago who managed to find ways to grow 'uala (Hawaiian sweet potatoes) and other crops among the lunar like landscape of the lower slope of the volcano. Their memory is preserved today in the Pu'u Loa Petroglyph site that sits just less than 3/4 of a mile off the road. The crude patterned and anthropomorphic scratchings in the rock have somehow managed to avoid eruption after eruption so we can see them today. The round trip is a little less than 1.5 miles and it took us about an hour to get there and back, a reminder of how difficult it is to move over this sort of landscape. Wear a hat if it's sunny and you have as little or less hair as I do up top. You'll regret not having one. Trust me.

The rest of the Chain of Craters Road gets you a look at gorgeous vistas, fossilized white trees and plenty of tsunami warning signs. You can get good education on tsunamis and how much they might destroy by walking along the Pacific Ocean shore and feeling the spray from a relatively calm sea breaking on the back rocks some thirty or forty feet below you. The whole trip made it pretty evident what kind of destruction this volcano and the nearby ocean is capable of, which is exactly what I was looking for. Once all that was done, it was time to go see the crater.

Some of the Pu'u Loa Petroglyphs.

Prior to visiting Volcanoes National Park, my only trip to see the crater of a volcano was last April when I bussed and walked to the top of Italy's Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that wiped out the Roman towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum and some others about 2,000 years ago. The crater of that volcano is about a half a mile across. I thought that was pretty typical for one of these things. The Kilauea Caldera is about eight miles across; it's absolutely enormous. And it's active, or at least the Halema'uma'u Crater where Pele lives is, which is about the size of the entire crater at Vesuvius.

At Vesuvius you can get right up to the mouth of the crater. No such luck at Halema'uma'u. While it would be cool to get a peek at the lake of molten lava, there is a very obvious cloud of toxic sulphur dioxide gas emanating from the volcano which prohibits up close access. When we visited the Park's Jaggar Museum, which at about 3/4 of a mile away is the closest you can get to the crater, we found park rangers with gas masks in case the winds shifted. Indeed at one point, we all had to be ushered inside the building until the wind shifted directions.

The gas rising from the unseen lava is cool but in the daytime a cloud of gas is all you can see. The better view of the crater is at night, starting at dusk and ending at dawn. We got as close as we could during the day, at nightfall and the next morning and the show in the fading and emerging light was worth the trip, even if we couldn't lay eyes on or walk beside (kidding...sort of) an active lava flow.

It's amazing that this sort of a sight captured my imagination the way that it did. And way more so in the evening and morning than during the day. I couldn't hear much at all and all I could see was a smoking glow, as if someone had lit a bonfire inside the volcano's crater. But it captivated me enough to just stand and stare. We spent a total of three sessions of about 30 minutes each just watching gas rise from an unseen lake of lava. But the way the glow shifted from side to side on the left of the crater and the barely audible white noise like sound in the isolated dusk and dawn hit me was was enough to make us just watch and imagine.

If I can find places that make me stop and dream for a couple of hours on each vacation, I'll be satisfied with every one of them. Even though we didn't see actual molten rock on this trip, I'm glad we went to Volcanoes. I'm glad we got a taste for just how dangerous and angry Pele could be and seeing the dawn making the lava's glow disappear as the sun rose was a definite highlight of this trip for me even if all I did was stand in one spot and look and be silent and think. I'm still disappointed about the lava, though. Maybe next time?