Pele

5/4/2017

...Continued from yesterday:
The next morning, Friday morning, we started out the day with breakfast at the friendly Crater Rim Cafe,

...where we bought a local paper to check who won the previous evening's Merrie Monarch hula competitions.

Then we drove back out to the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park; having seen the inner crater at night, we now had a hankering to see it again to compare how differently it looked by day.

As it turned out, this day Halma'uma'u was really bubbling up some lava.

The nice and very informative park ranger, who grew up not far from the Kilauea Caldera,

..told us that Pele was active that day.

In the Hawaiian religion Pele is the goddess of fire and volcanoes.

After we'd paid our respects to Pele we left the park and drove south to the coast along the Chain of Craters Road until the road ended at a ranger station.
After a proper grilling and inspection of our footwear by the park ranger,who was also very nice, but just doing her job,

to make sure no naive tourists get into trouble in volcano country,

... we began the 11 1/2 mile round-trip hike along the coast line to Pu'u' O' o, a volcanic crater in the east rift zone of Kilauea, that has been continuously pumping out lava since 1983.

Here, I expect, is what the crater - I snagged this image of Pu'u O'o from the 'net - might have looked like had we made it to the end of the trail - spoiler alert, we didn't make it to the end -

...but we had a nice hike anyway, or at least it was nice for about 4 1/2 miles until the hiking path ended and we came to the off-path lava field,

...a moonscape of high, steep, uneven crags,

...and fissures,

...that offered only a rope line as a guide to keep one from getting lost on the lava field.

A few steps into the lava field I threw in the towel and turned back. Tom, a speck way off in the distance in the above picture, soldiered on for about another hundred yards before turning back.

But up until that point there was a gravel path to hike along,

...with the sea on one side,

...and smoking hills on the other,

...through the older lava fields,

...and the newer ones.

The newer lava fields were works of natural art.

And I had several sightings of Jabba the Hut ,

...in various stages of melt-down.

All along the trail were signs warning hikers to stay 1/4 mile inland to avoid breathing the hydrochloric acid fumes that could form when the sulfur from the volcanic plume mixes with the sea water, and not to enter the water, as the lava pouring into the ocean from Pu'u O'o raises the sea water along the coast to a scalding to boiling temperature.
As we came closer to Pu'u O'o we could see off in the distance the steam plum from where the hot lava met the sea.

Then we arrived at the end of the gravel path,

...where there were signs pointing us in the direction of the crater,

...along the rope line.

There were also a number of signs where the path ended and the rope line began warning us of the dangers ahead:

By now there was a vaguely familiar smell in the air reminiscent of the smell of my high school chemistry class; which, as I recall, I was no better at than I was at crossing the lava field.
So, mission aborted, we walked back to the ranger station and arrived just in time to see a most amazing sight: the sudden rising of a behemoth steam plume, massively visible all these miles away.