Day 5 - LAVA!!!

The day here is not over - it's only 2:30 for us - be we are DONE!  We got up at 5:30am and drove to the end of Chain of Craters Road in the park that goes from the visitors center all the way down to the coast (about 4000 ft in elevation change).  We prepared the night before the have food to munch on and had all of our gear ready.  Why - to hike in to see the current and only lava flow.  It just broke through and is now pouring into the ocean.  

The hike is about 10 miles round trip.  We started the trail around 7am.

The white stuff on us is sunscreen by the way.  It's wide open and there is no shade on this trip.  We came prepared with about 2.5 liters of water each.  We needed almost all of it.  We had about a 15 MPH wind ion our faces the whole way in.  We averaged about 3.4 MPH on the trail.  Gaia GPS is an awesome app for the iPhone BTW.

The walk in was mostly a gravel road.  It is flat by our mountain standards, but 4 miles of rolling hills is still a trek.  You can see in the upper left above the black lava what looks like clouds...that's the Pu'u O'o' flow coming down the mountain.  

Most of the trail really looks the same, but there is some awesome lava formations along the way.  This one is considered 'ropey' and is called Pahoehoe.  

There's some nasty sh*t that comes out of the vents.  Sulphur dioxide is one.  You can smell it as you approach the flow.  

 

You could feel the heat about 100 yards before you got to the flow.  It was HOT.  I mean HOT.  It was like standing in an oven.  You could see the air disturbance around you it was so hot.  

Since the hottest lava stays underneath, the lava on the crust has 'cooled' to a black color.  Ever naw and then, you could spot some red peaking out.  

See it under there? 

We made some obligatory selfles to prove we were there.  

Make no mistake, where we are standing is HOT.  You begin to feel the hot air burn after just a few seconds.  

Also one more thing.  We saw most people being respectful, but in Hawaii, poking at lava is considered very disrepectful.  Lava rock is also illegal to take and is considered bad luck (like catastrophic bad luck).  

We headed back and enjoyed the walk along the coast.  

OH! And before we started the hike, a group of Hawaiian geese walked by.  Very endangered and sacred.  They're called NeNe (like watch me NeNe).  

As we got back towards the car, the landscape turned back into a grassy, shrubby look.  There was a grove a coconut trees planted along the road from a family in the 1960s.  

Beat, tired, blistered, but happy.  It was a good day.  We came back to the lodge and ate a well earned lunch.  Kim napped, and I wrote this.   Aloha!