2015/03 Hawaii trip - Kilauea Iki |
|||||
Saturday February 28th
It was a cloudy and humid morning and we were going back up the mountain to resume where we’d left off on Thursday, specifically to hike across the Kilauea volcano’s Iki crater. The park was very busy on this Saturday so we concluded that a lot of the visitors were local to Hawaii.
 |
Kilauea Iki (14.24) |
 |
|---|
The trail took us about two miles around the crater rim, where we had this view of Pu’u Pua’i, the cone we’d seen in the distance from Jagger. At the bottom of the cone are the circular vent and cracks that fed the lava fountain back in 1959. The fountain ran for weeks with a sound like a jet engine, topping out at nearly 2000 feet, building the cone, and also blasting the area around our trail with rocks a yard wide.
The trail dropped down steeply to the “bathtub ring” above the crater floor, giving this panoramic view. During the 1959 eruption the crater floor was covered with molten lava, but when the eruption ended, most of the lava flowed back into the vent in a giant whirlpool. What was left around the edges is called the bathtub ring.
Climbing down it is difficult because of the ripples and shifting angles but the crater floor was easier, though there were many cracks in the lava and holes and tunnels below the trail. The rocks were warm and some of the vents were steaming, as, even nearly sixty years on, there is still molten lava close to the surface. We ate lunch by a nasty-looking field of a’a lava and made our way to the eruption vent, now quiet of course, and overshadowed by the massive Pu’u Pua’i, the “gushing hill” created by the fountain of lava. These pictures show the draining crack, now choked with boulders, and the main vent that fed the fountain.
We climbed up a terrace to see a roaring steam vent, a reminder that this can be a dangerous place. The steam isn’t just wafting vapour; it’s scalding hot and the rocks around it are hot enough to burn. Sandie could feel the heat through her shoes.
From up there we could see the white mineral patterns on the black lava, left by water runoff from the vents. Despite all this heat and steam, plants were taking back the crater floor, ferns and ohias with their red blossoms. In places the lava was 
encrusted with green crystals of olivine, similar to what we’d found in the crater of New Mexico’s Kilbourne Hole back in ’06.
The late afternoon climb back out of the crater wasn’t a lot of fun for my back, but we had a great view over the Iki crater; we could see Halema’uma’u smoking in the distance and could see the small forested ledge that separates the two craters. I’d spotted a trail that went into that forest; maybe a good hike for another day. (We came back to that trail on our last day.)
|
Devastation Trail (1.06) |
 |
|---|
We had enough energy and daylight for a short hike from the crater rim and around the Devastation Trail. This goes through the forest that was destroyed by the lava fountain’s creation of the Pu’u Pua’i cone. From a distance the cone looks to be a 
barren expanse of cinders, but plants were slowly recolonizing its slopes. Until the next eruption anyway.
We’d been glimpsing what we thought were large brown squirrels with bushy tails, but got close enough to one here to realize that it was actually a mongoose. These are feisty carnivores, famous for hunting poisonous snakes (read Rikki-Tikki-Tavi in Jungle Book). They were brought into Hawaii to control the rats, but mongooses don’t work nights like rats do, and they’ve been eating the birds instead.
Thunder was rumbling around the mountains as we left; at least, we hoped it was just thunder. Back at the cottage we had torrential rain, loud enough that we couldn’t hear the frogs. I was locked into the laptop anyway, booking up for trips in the following week.