Hawaii Day Seven

On day seven we spent the entire day at Volcanoes National Park.  It’s just like your typical national park, lots of trails and nature, but this one has a volcano too!  When we got there we were just in time to catch a ranger guided tour into the caldera of Kilauea.  The caldera was closed because the air quality is always changing, so the only way to get down there is on one of these tours.

It was a nice tour down.  The tour guide pointed out different vegetation and explained how vulnerable the indigenous plants, and animals are because they evolved to not have any defense mechanisms.  People have brought other plants to the islands and they grow wild suffocating out other plants.  Wild pigs are their biggest problem.  They eat big areas of vegetation leaving big holes, which fill up with water.  The water is breading grounds for mosquitoes, which spread disease, and kill indigenous birds, which then aren’t there to pollinate the plants, so even more plants die off.  It one big vicious circle.

Inside the Kilauea caldera was pretty cool.  It’s probably as close as a person can get to Halema’uma’u crater.  That is where it is still active and steaming.  Kilauea is actually the longest active volcano.  It’s been flowing since 1982, and the flows are always changing.  When we were there all the flows were underground.

After the tour to the Kilauea caldera we checked out a few other things in the park, some steam vents, some old lava tubes where lava once flowed underground, and a bunch of old lava flows.  We followed the old lava flows down to the cost.  It was pretty impressive.

We stayed in the park until sunset to see the glow from Halema’uma’u crater.  It was pretty cool, but too far away to get a decent picture.  Seeing Kilauea was pretty darn cool, and obviously a learning experience.