Pele...We Aren't Scared of You!!

July 2-4 - Our 2 1/2 days at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

We arrived after a 3 hour drive across the island to Volcano Village Lodge.  I found this BandB on Tripadvisor.com and it definitely far exceeded all the reviews that I read.  It was beautiful. We stayed in Mauna Loa - there are 5 different little cabin/lodges and each is it's own building in the middle of the rain forest.  We were up at 4,000 feet and it basically raineed or misted (fairy rain as Barb and Edgar call it) the whole time. We had times of no rain, but it was still in the low 70's for our whole visit.  Vastly different from near 90 on the other, dry side of the island.

 Here are some shots of our lodge, Mauna Loa:

We then headed up to the Volcano Park - about 1 mile from our lodge.

I am posting pics from all 3 days and will try to explain some of it.  It was awesome and amazing.  The most recent active lava flow that we saw was from 2008 and went across the road.  We also went back at night and could see some of the glowing lava that is down in a lake in the middle of one of the craters.  It's not visible during the day, just looks like a big steam vent.  We also found ancient petroglyphs - 400-700 years old and created from the native Hawaiians.

Thurston Lava tube - lava hardened on top and continued to flow like a river through a tube towards the ocean.  This was discovered in 1913ish and you can now walk through the tube that the lava flowed through

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see the sign....and notice where Don is......

He's the one far up on the hill  way beyond where the sign says you are allowed to go! :)

Devastation Trail - another area where lava flowed very fast and hardened in pumice like lava stones.  It was like big lava dunes - very sand-like....very cool!!  All the vegetation in this area was killed and is slowly starting to grow back.

That first evening we headed up to where we can see the glow of active lava:  

Here it is at night: (Don's pics are much better)

and the same spot during the day - notice the steam vent - that is the pool where the active lava is:

Just what the sign says.....

 Then we headed down towards the ocean to the most recent lava flow - it went right across the road towards the ocean in the 2000's - most recently in 2008.  Though there are some spots further down - not visible that were flowing actively in May (yes, just 2 months ago). Crazy!!

It's really neat, from far away it looks mushy...but obviously (from the pics) it's not!  Really neat!!  My pics don't do it justice.  Don's 1,000 or so will be amazing!!

We then walked back and found the sea arch made from lava entering the ocean.  Another neat phenomena...

I'm going to stop here and continue with the petroglyphs and our side trips to the Hilo Farmer's Market and Akaka Falls in the next post - maybe tomorrow or might not be until we get back to San Fransisco.
 

During this part of the trip, I became very interested in Pele, the goddess of fire.  Her picture is everywhere in the park and her story is really interesting.

My two new interests: King Kamehameha and Pele.


I hope I'm not boring anyone!! :)