Volcano!

March 30, 2025

I’m on a two week visit to Hawaii, being hosted by my sister, who lives in Honolulu. I have never been to any of the other islands when I visited Adele, and this time Josette is with me, so we planned to go to the big Island of Hawaii to see something different.

Josette being tired of me taking photos of her eating

We stopped in Hilo for some lunch, a bowl of poke which we shared. We did a little bit of souvenir shopping at the farmers market, and bought some fruit. Then we drove to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, When we got to the entrance, I was surprised to see cars waiting in line to get inside, and the staff at the gates were waving people through without stopping for payment.

There were cars parked all along both sides of the road in the ditches, but we waited till we reached the parking lot and found an empty space. We followed a large crowd, hurriedly walking to the crater rim. And there it was, a huge column of smoke and red/orange molten lava pouring out of the Earth in a gigantic fountain. Until that point it had not occurred to me that we might be about to see the volcanic eruption.

After a few minutes, we walked on the crater rim trail toward the eruption. As we got to the point where the trail was blocked, we could feel tiny volcanic rock pieces falling on us, as well as Pele’s hair. It wasn’t volcanic ash, it was very small, black grains of volcanic rock. I’ve never heard of Pehl’s hair before but now I know; It was all over us by the time we got back to the car. These long, thin slivers of silicone are produced in the cloud and they look like hair and are sharp and will stick you like a tiny cactus thorn. By the time we got back to the beginning of that trail near the visitor center, it had been closed.

The volcano roared loudly and the shape of the fountain changed. I learned later that during the afternoon it was running between 700 and 1000 feet high. The next day I met a guy who is a retired Geologist from California, and he had been watching the volcanoes activity closely on the USGS website, and took a guess about the eruption and came the day before. I learned a good deal from him about lava as well, the two types, the very rough lava ʻa‘ā, and the ropey smoother lava: Pāhoehoe.

The following day we went back and walked the Kīlauea Iki trail across a quieter part of the crater floor. It was altogether a surreal experience.

That evening, we found a black sand beach about 6 miles from Airbnb on the South Shore of the island, took a very short swim, as I got, knocked down by a wave and decided that was far enough. We watched the sunset there, and on leaving by a different trail at the far end of the beach, I asked a woman for directions to the trail, and I tried to ignore the fact that she was completely naked. And that this was just normal every day stuff for us.

Our B&B was situated on top of an old lava flow, and quite a bit different than what we’re used to. They have five rooms and a communal kitchen, and everything worked, although it is in a bit of disrepair. however, it’s quite inexpensive, $65 a night, somewhat less than the average hotel room of $350. Josette said I made a great choice and enjoyed the location immensely. We had coffee in the morning, looking out over the lava flow.

Here are some other parts of the big island: