Big Island East Side

Roaming around the Big Island of Hawaii, I came upon this fine coastal scene near Na'alehu in the far southern part of the island.  The surf is often rough here...it comes straight from Antarctica, six thousand miles to the south, without interruption.

Halema'uma'u blowing off steam.  The current eruption has been ongoing since 2008, forcing closure of the crater rim road due to noxious fumes.  The steam is coming from a lava lake in the crater.  Over the past two centuries, some sort of alava  lake has existed here well over half the time.  While we were there the crater let off a boom...apparently a bit of the side collapsed.

Sunrise at Orchid Elua, our rental house in Kapoho.  It's two blocks from the ocean, and rode out tropical storm Iselle with no damage.  But at the waterfront, massive damage...homes wrecked, the road washed out, trees down all over the place.

Pahoehoe lava at Kalapana, vintage 1990.  I was here in March 1990, watching lava ooze down a mountainside a few miles away, burning the forest near the highway.  A few days later, the lava buried most of the village and moved out to sea, creating this new land...where I'm standing was open ocean until 1990.

The swimming pool at Orchid Elua.  It's a natural tidepool, tidied up with a rock border.  The rocks and mud at the bottom are warm...Madam Pele heats the pool to 84-88 degrees, compared to the ocean temperature of 80.  The level of the pool fluctuates 2-3 feet daily with the tides, but is always deep enough for swimming, or noodle flotation.  It's verrry nice.

The maintenance guy at our neighbor house, White Orchid, created this Zen garden one afternoon.  The homes are both owned by Cosette, a local artist who has decorated Orchid Elua with her beautiful paintings.

Kilauea Iki, in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.  Before 1959, this was a forested crater, somewhat deeper than now.  Then a massive eruption sent lava soaring 1900 feet into the air out of a vent in the upper right part of the picture.  The lava filled the crater,creating a molten lake.   The eruption subsided, the lava cooled, and now you can hike across the crater.  It's a beautiful and surreal hike.  The last of the molten lava did not solidify until about 40 years after the eruption.  BTW the tree with the red flowers in the foreground is an ohia lehua.

This is a 1969 lava flow a few miles south of Kilauea crater.  It raced through a forest, surrounding trees.  As the lava cooled and subsided, the sites of the tree endured in the lava pillars visible in this pic.  I first hiked this trail in 1984; many of the lava molds had dead tree trunks in them.  Those have since rotted away, but molds like the black mounds all have round holes in the tops of them, marking the old trees entombed by the lava.  Some of the molds have impressions of the tree bark.

Mauna Ulu lava field in late afternoon.  There is quite a bit of olivine in this lava...little green crystals in a sea of black rock.

At dusk we repaired to the bar at Volcano House for drinks and pupus.  A brisk northeast wind and falling temperatures enhanced the steam vents on the rim of Kilauea and sent the steam into the crater.

At night the Halema'uma'u fire pit glows.  This is the home of Madam Pele, according to legend.  Easy to see why.  Blow up the pic for a better view of the molten heart of Kilauea.

I'm currently on a road trip in Kamuela...the Big Island is the only one big enough to support road trips!  This is a view of Mauna Loa from the Saddle Road, with pahoehoe in the foreground.

Mauna Kea.  We went up to the Onizuka Visitor Center, 9000 feet above sea level.  65 degrees with a brisk wind up there, actually rather warm for that altitude.