Hawaii - day 2

Sunday, Dec 12: Breakfast at McDonalds. We saw tons of motorcycles and classic cars turned out for some kind of event; turns out it was the Rock and Roll Motorcycle Club's 15th annual Toys for Tots motorcade!

After breakfast, we went to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which was pretty awesome. Admission was $10/car and good for a week.

The rest of the crater rim drive was closed, but we could still drive up to Jaggar museum, which offered an overlook of the Kilauea caldera:

The caldera extends beyond the frame of this picture; the crater visible in the photo is Halema'uma'u crater, which vents a mixture of steam and sulfur dioxide.

Although the lava is not visible, at night (sorry, no pictures) it illuminates the steam plume with an incandescent glow.

Along the caldera rim, there are other vents:

Some of them are by the roadside and remind me of subway work in New York (sidenote: it turns out the steam in NYC is actually from Con Edison's steam system, the largest district heating system in the US!)

Others are more natural looking: gashes in the earth that effuse moisture, with a dramatic effect on nearby flora.

We hiked the Kilauea Iki trail, which goes along the edge of the Kilauea Iki crater and then down onto the floor of the former lava lake. Some of the railings along the way showed evidence (I think) of lava splatter:

The path along the crater rim is very jungle-y.

From the crater rim, there's a pretty good overview of the Kilauea Iki crater.

In 1959, it was a lava lake. On the side away from the lava fountain (shown above), it's quite smooth. You can see the path that's been worn in by tourists crossing the crater floor.

It's really quite big.

The cracked mound in the center of this picture is the ash cone created by the former lava fountain. It's a different color from the rest of the crater, and the material is more like loose sand than rock.

We followed the rim trail to the far side of the crater and came back across the crater floor, starting on the far side of the lava fountain. Here, the rock is more broken up.

Closer to the lava fountain, the rock formations get more severe, probably due to the backflow while solidifying.

In the cracks, some intrepid plants have taken hold and will eventually create a layer of organic material for future flora.

We found a lot of "Pele's Hair", long filaments of glassy rock that formed while cooling in mid-air. It bears an uncanny resemblance to dirty blonde hair.

As we move away from the lava fountain, the crater floor gets quite smooth, with a couple cracked mounds breaking the surface. Note the fabric-like folds in the solid rock!

These are constantly spewing steam, apparently from rainwater that has trickled down into contact with subterranean lava (or is it magma?).

Beyond these mounds, the crater floor is smooth. There is a network of cracks between gentle mounds, and over here there is white material around those cracks.

We couldn't decide if it was chemical precipitate from the vents that had settled into the cracks, or if it was some kind of lichen attracted to the moisture seeping from the cracks.

As we got farther away, some of these cracks revealed ferns and other plants growing underneath!

The plants we saw also started getting bigger and healthier-looking:

However, the edge of the crater still showed a marked transition from (mostly) barren lava rock to dense forest.

Our last stop in Volcanoes National Park was the Thurston lava tube:

I personally didn't find it all that exciting, though the geology of its formation is kinda neat: it started as a lava flow in a trench; then the top surface cooled and solidified, leaving a tube of lava flowing in the core. Finally, that flow began to subside, no longer filling the tube, until it finally stopped, leaving a flat floor to the tube.

So the tube is exactly that: a round tube of fairly consistent diameter with a flat floor. Rather like a pedestrian underpass, but without the hobos.

For dinner, we went to the Seaside Restaurant and Aqua Farm in Hilo. They have fenced-in pools of fish:

There's also a ton of white birds that come to roost in the trees around this lake. I wish I had a better picture -- it's quite a sight.

For dinner, we finally got our ahi poke:

And giant slabs of prime rib.

It was very good, but in retrospect, maybe we should have tried the fish, it being an aqua farm and all...