Kilauea

Started: 2025-01-17 23:08:58

Submitted: 2025-01-18 13:13:17

Visibility: World-readable

Visiting an active volcanic eruption on the Big Island of Hawaii

On New Year's Day we visited Kilauea volcano in the middle of its active eruption. Our timing proved fortuitous because the eruption paused on the evening of January 3; if we had waited too long we would have missed it.

On our way out of Waikola Village I stopped for coffee and discovered, as I was trying to pay for my cold-brew, that I didn't have my wallet (and I had left my phone in the car because I didn't think I'd need it). I apologized and nipped back out to the car to grab my phone. While I was waiting in line again to pay, Kiesa nipped back to the condo to find my wallet in another pair of pants. I paid for my coffee with contactless (Apple Pay) on my phone, and it turned out that the cashier had already put my order in so it was ready before the group ahead of me. By the time Kiesa came back with my wallet I was ready with my coffee. (In the postmortem I'm always writing, I identified where we got lucky that I had discovered my missing wallet when we were merely across the street from the condo, not halfway across the island.)

To get to Kilauea from where we were staying we climbed to drive across Saddle Road between the two highest volcanoes on the island (Mauna Kea to our left, Mauna Loa to the right), descended to pass through the outskirts of Hilo, and climbed again to the volcano, a drive that took the better part of two hours. Every half-hour we entered a new micro-climate: we departed the hot-and-dry leeward side of the island, where grasslands were barely beginning to overtake centuries-old lava flows, to the cooler higher-elevation terrain around the volcanoes. (It didn't look like it rained all that much there either, but there was more cloud cover and a bit more moisture.) On our long descent towards Hilo the jungle grew up on both sides of the road, indicating that we'd crossed onto the wetter windward side of the island. Hilo itself reminded me somehow of Anacortes: a city perched on a hillside above a bay, stubbornly adhering to a regular grid system even if the local topography disagreed, all of the yards green and overgrown, hiding houses streaked with mold but standing defiantly in the wet climate.

As we drove along the Hawaii Belt Road through the jungle past the town of Volcano I began to realize that the large cloud I could see in the distance was in fact the plume rising from the volcanic eruption that we had come to see.

We entered Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and stopped by the Kilauea Visitor Center to learn about the volcano and the ecosystems it supports. We caught part of the introductory video in the theater and looked at the displays about the hotspot that created the Hawaiian Islands. On the way out we dropped by gift shop (I got a book about the Hawaiian language in an attempt to pronounce more of the names, and a sticker).

We drove to the Devastation parking lot and hiked along the Old Crater Rim Drive, formerly a paved road that orbited the entire crater that was closed permanently when part of the road fell into the crater during an earlier eruption. This had once been a two-lane paved road, but the jungle was reclaiming the road: grass encroached on the road from both sides, squeezing pedestrian traffic into half of the original width. The road was full of people heading to the best viewing site open to the public for the current eruption.

As we approached the crater the jungle thinned out, replaced by more recent volcanic rock, and a volcanic gravel called tephra formed when airborne lava cools and hardens into pebbles before it his the ground. As the trees thinned I could see the plume above the eruption again, and I was briefly worried how much we'd be able to see in the caldera.

Then the trail turned off the road onto a spur leading down to the viewing area, and I could look right over the heads of the people standing at the edge of the caldera looking at the giant fountains of lava below.

I stepped up to the rope keeping me from the edge of the caldera to watch the fountains of lava a mile-and-a-half away from two jets nestled in front of the crater wall.

The US Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory tells me in one of its daily reports on the eruption that the cliff behind the vent is 210 meters tall. The lava fountain from the south vent in my picture is easily one-third of the height of the cliff, so it's easily 70 meters high. (I feel like I remember it even higher than I was able to photograph, and the USGS report from 2nd January indicates that the fountain from the south vent was 80-90 meters.)

I stood, transfixed, by the lava fountain, as if I had stepped into the pages of National Geographic, watching it spray red-hot molten lava into the air and fall back into the lake of lava covering the floor of the caldera. The current eruption had covered the lowest parts of the caldera in lava that was slowly cooling, but still visibly steaming in places far from the vent.

My best zoom lens is on my Nikon DSLR, and it lets me take video on the camera (even though it's not precisely optimized for video). I didn't have a tripod to steady my shot, so this short clip is shaky, but it shows in video what I can't show in a still: the lava rising from the vent and falling back to the lake of lava.

In the eastern part of the caldera, far from the current lava fountain, I saw the now-cooled spatter cones surrounding the vents from a 2023 eruption. These cones are now surrounded the lake of lava from the current eruption, slowly cooling but still being fed with new lava as the eruption continues.

After watching the lava fountain we headed back along the trail to return to the car.

By this point it was time for lunch, so we drove down the Hilina Pali Road (mostly because this was a road we'd skipped the last time we visited Hawaii in 2018) towards the picnic area marked on the map at Kulanaokuaiki. The road was a one-lane paved road, with some pull-outs scattered intermittently along the side. The vegetation was mostly high grass, with some thin trees; the grass reached out to scrape the side of the car as I drove. We reached the parking lot at the picnic area and camp ground without seeing another car in any direction, so I didn't have to find a pull-out. There was one other car at the parking lot, belonging to a guy who was camping at one of the sites. We found a picnic table and ate the lunch we had brought.

We were south of the caldera, and it was out of view below the rolling hills covered with scrubby vegetation and the occasional small tree, but I could still see the plume rising from the eruption in the distance.

We drove back along the Chain of Craters Road and stopped to look at the lava from a 1974 eruption.

This lava was older than me, and was only beginning to grow small ohia trees and ferns. We were on the edge of the jungle, just low enough that the forest would eventually reclaim this land as it had reclaimed all of the land elsewhere on the island.

The next thing we wanted to see was the lava tube next to Chain of Craters Road, so we drove past the tiny lava tube parking lot, confirmed there were no spaces available, and parked at the Kilauea Iki Overlook.

The walk back to the lava tube took us past Kilauea Iki Crater, which last erupted in 1959, forming a lake of lava like the nearby eruption, and now features a trail across the solid lava. (We hiked across the bottom of the crater in 2018.) From the crater rim we could look across the crater to the plume rising from the eruption in the larger caldera just out of view.

When the trail pulled back from the edge of the crater we were walking in the Hawaiian rain forest. The displays in the visitor's center told us that the Hawaiian rain forests were not as species-rich as their continental counterparts: the highest level was dominated by ohia trees, the middle level was dominated by tree ferns, and the lowest level right on the ground had an assortment of small shrubs and grasses and sedges. Many of the plants were labeled so we could identify them in their context in the forest.

We reached the entrance to the lava tube and followed the trail into the sinkhole caused by the collapse of the tube. The sinkhole captured more water than the surrounding forest, leading to a proliferation of vegetation. I didn't see any indication of how old they thought the lava tube was, but given that the jungle had completely claimed the land on top I presume it must have been formed in an eruption thousands of years ago.

The lava tube was formed millennia ago when molten lava flowing on the surface from an ongoing eruption began to cool and solidify along the edges of an active channel, then built up walls along the sides and finally closed over the top. The lava drained out of the tube when the eruption subsided, leaving the solid walls and ceiling. The inside of the lava tube was lit by downward-facing wall scones part-way up the wall, creating an eerie lighting scheme in the tunnel. The tunnel was wide and high, though there were a few places where the ceiling encroached low enough that I had to watch my head. The floor was smooth lava worn even smoother by the steps of people walking across. It was cool and damp underground; water seeped through the rock and dripped down the walls. Roots from trees on the surface dangled in the air, reaching down like aerial roots.

From beginning to end the walk through the lava tube took three minutes, according to the timestamps on my pictures. We emerged into a stairway built into a sink hole forming our exit from the tube, though the tube continued behind a fence, disappearing in the darkness underground.

After the lava tube we had seen the highlights of the volcano that we wanted to see, so we drove back towards Hilo, stopping along the way to get groceries. Kiesa found a veg-friendly Thai restaurant in Hilo, which turned out to be closed for New Year's Day, so we walked around the block to Pineapples, a restaurant we ate at when we visited Hilo in 2018. They offered fruity tropical drinks served in whole Maui Gold pineapples, and it seemed like we ought to try it for the experience. The rest of the meal was good; our server suggested substituting tofu for fish in a pasta dish with a spicy sauce, which turned out to be a good idea.

By the time we finished eating it had started raining in Hilo. (We had brought our rain coats because of the possibility of rain in the forecast, but left them in the car a block away.) The rain persisted as we drove out of Hilo and tapered as we climbed Saddle Road, at the edge of the rain forest fed by rain on the island's windward eastern side. It was clear the rest of the way back to our condo in Waikola Village for the night.

I took even more pictures at and around the volcano than I included above. They're all at Photos on 2025-01-01.