Hawaii Volcanoes National Park - Kilauea Iki

Along Crater Rim Road, we stopped at a lookout over Kilauea Iki, a crater in the Kilauea caldera that was filled with a lava lake in 1959.

Through vegetation


Through less vegetation. You can see the smoke (sulfur dioxide) from the Halemaumau crater in the distance (looks like a low over-exposed cloud).


Seeing that it wasn't very far, we decided to hike down into the crater. The rock underneath is still hot, and water seeping down to the hot rock leads to some steam vents. I've read that you can still feel the heat from the deep rocks on the surface, but in the afternoon sun, it was hard to differentiate that heat from the heat one would expect black rocks sitting in the sun to emit.

A view just as we stepped onto the crater floor


These pretty little shrubs manage to sprout out of what looks it like should be a barren scene.


The Housemate!


A silly (and imperfect--that darn dark strip in the middle!) panoramic. Click for a larger view...

My Big Island trip: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

On Saturday, the Housemate and I drove around the south point of the Big Island and back up to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, on the east side of the island. This route took somewhere around three hours which, considering that you can get from one corner of Oahu to the farthest corner in about an hour, seemed like a very long way--it's like being on the mainland! Anyway, we made it to the visitor center in the early afternoon (we'd had a relatively late start that morning) and put together our plan. We'd drive around Crater Rim Road, stop at a few sites with short hikes or scenic views--Halema'uma'u Crater lookouts, steam vents, the Thurston lava tube, and Kilauea Iki--then at sunset drive outside of the main park area and make our way to the site where you can sometimes see hot lava flowing into the ocean in the distance. Grab dinner around 7:30, be on the road again by 8-8:30, home around 11. Nice plan, right? Well, the first part worked out pretty well, but the last part about dinner and home by 11 was not to be. More on that when the time comes.

They had a large chunk of Crater Rim Road, the road that goes around the Kilauea Caldera, blocked off, due to the unusually high levels of poisonous sulfur dioxide gas being spewed into the air by the Halemaumau Crater. Luckily the wind was blowing relatively steadily one way, so we could still safely view the crater from certain directions.

Here's the crater (inside the larger caldera) from one angle.


And from another angle. At this site, you could just start to smell the unpleasant odor of the sulfur. We made this stop a short one.


Last time I visited Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, with my family in 2007, we were able to drive around to the closer lookout of the crater, where you now see the plume of smoke covering. The sulfur dioxide plume apparently started up in 2008, for the first time since 1982.

Back towards what in the photos above would be the "left" side of the caldera (away from the smoke plume), we stopped at the Thurston lava tube, decidedly longer than the lava tube by the highway in Kona. It's a very short and easy hike (slightly steep, but with a well-traveled path) to get to the lava tube, and the first part of it is well lighted.

The Housemate makes his way down the lighted portion of the tube.


The second part of the tube is not lighted at all, and it's really pitch black, so only people with flashlights can go there safely. We had the LEDs on our cameras, so we thought we'd go down a bit.


Coming up tomorrow: Kilauea Iki, a lovely crater that we hiked down into.

My Big Island trip: Hapuna Bay

After our short but worthwhile visit to Pine Trees beach, and our little stop by the highway to see the lava tube, we made our way north to Hapuna Bay. It was a beautiful beach with soft sand, and bigger than Magic Sands. The coral reefs were also much more impressive.

The first thing I saw when I got in, even before I made it to the reef, was this awesome crown of thorns, just walking along on the bottom.


A close-up side view, courtesy of the Housemate (I mentioned he was the better diver). He also got a cool video of it where you can see its little tube feet at work, but as I said before, the video will take me a little longer to go through and edit, so you'll have to wait.


Unfortunately, as cool as they look, crowns of thorns are coral eaters. Look at this patch of reef it's cleared. All that white used to have living organisms coloring it. Apparently, it can clear a patch a few times this size in one day.


The Housemate got this shot of a fish hanging out in the sand.


Not a great picture, but I happened to notice something cool happening here. To the right of and slightly below center is a small fish that is half yellow, half blue (you may need to click on the photo to enlarge it). It is a cleaner wrasse. You can see it on another, larger fish (a saddle wrasse), eating parasites off its back. The saddle wrasse gets a free cleaning, and the cleaner wrasse gets a free meal. Everyone's happy!


I was kind of stalking these two butterflyfish. I've seen them before in Hanauma, and I saw some at another spot on the Big Island, and they seem always to swim in pairs. They're so adorable. And check out all that coral, too!


Here they are, traveling far and wide, together. Sweet.


Now here's a funny fish. The Housemate, obviously, took this one of me.

My Big Island trip: Pine Trees Beach

On Friday, the Housemate and I went along with his brother's family to Pine Trees Beach. The Housemate and his brother were planning to go surfing while the rest of us played in the (coarse) sand and tide pools. However, the many sea urchins made the trek out to the less-than-impressive waves not worth it, so we ended up staying there only for about an hour.

Still, the beach was unlike any that you'd see on O'ahu, where the land is older, and the lava flows a more distant memory. If you're not familiar with the geological history of the Hawaiian Islands, they are formed from volcanoes caused by a hot spot in the Earth's mantle. As the Pacific tectonic plate has moved northwest over the hot spot, the Hawaiian Islands have formed successively in the southeast direction; the Big Island is the newest, with still active volcanoes. Even on the Kona (west) side of the island, far from the east side's Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, the land is young enough to show many clear signs of its lava flow past; the most recent lava flow to reach Kona was in 1950.

Pine Trees has a distinctive pahoehoe rocky coast; pahoehoe is the less viscous, more free-flowing lava that can harden into cool ripply/folded patterns (not sure how to describe it...just look at the photos). We also saw a few cute things in the tide pools, and the road to the beach had some interesting rock formations.

This was on the dirt road that led down to the beach. My theory is that a lava flow hardened over a layer of rubble/dirt/softer rock that was resting on top of a previous hard lava flow. Over time, the layer in between washed out, but the hard lava flow rock remained. I'd love to have a geologist's explanation, though.


There were a whole series of those formations along the road. Here's a closer look into one of them.


View from the beach.


I liked this pahoehoe formation.


In the tide pool, the Housemate snapped a shot of this little (baby?) eel, as skinny as my finger. I got some video of it, but the video editing from the trip will take a little more time, so you'll have to wait for that one.


The Housemate pointed his camera under a rock in an attempt to get a different fish that got away, but here's what he found. I love that little guy in the upper left corner. I really want to know what it is. Cute enough to be a Pokemon.


This is a place we stopped at on the highway, slightly north of Pine Trees. It's just sitting there, no signs or anything, and you can't really see it from the highway (you have to walk to the edge of the slope to look down). But if you happen to know where to pull over, the lava tube is right there.


A look into the lava tube.


If you liked this lava tube and the lava rock formations, be sure to check back next week when I post photos from my trip to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Tomorrow I'll have more snorkeling photos.

My Big Island trip: Magic Sands Beach Park

On Wednesday of last week, the Housemate and I left Honolulu and landed in Kona, on the Big Island, less than an hour later. Inter-island travel is really quite easy. We got a rental car that we drove down to Kailua, where his brother lives with his family. We were welcomed with a delicious but very spicy Indonesian squid dish for dinner (the Housemate's sister-in-law is Indonesian); luckily there were homemade spring rolls as well which were not spicy, to relieve my burning tongue. They have two children, a three-year-old boy who has way too much energy (and perhaps stays up too late) and an eight-month-old girl who is very sweet but is also very shy--for the first day I was there, I couldn't look her in the eye without making her cry. It was rather upsetting: she'd be sitting there, happily playing with her toys, being utterly adorable, I'd look at her and smile and say "Oh, aren't you a cutey!" and then suddenly she'd be in tears. I felt like a mean old witch. But she was doing the same with the Housemate, her own uncle, so I didn't feel so bad, and we were past that stage by Friday. So the kids were cute, and we had lots of good food to eat.

On Thursday morning, the Housemate and I went snorkeling at a nearby beach called Magic Sands. The water was relatively clear, and I saw a number of things I'd never seen snorkeling before, including a fair bit of live coral. I understand that there are some nice spots for live coral on O'ahu (the island I live on), but the two spots that I've snorkeled here (Haleiwa and inner-reef Hanauma) are not among them. So I was impressed by all the live coral I saw at Magic Sands, though it turns out the two Big Island snorkel spots I went to later had much more.

To its credit, Hanauma Bay has a much higher concentration of fish than the reef at Magic Sands Beach, and it is much shallower, at least in the lagoon area on the shore side of the reef. This second point is very significant. See, since most of my snorkeling experience is from Hanauma Bay, I have thus far gotten along perfectly well without free diving. I could see basically everything I wanted to see from the surface. This was not the case on the Big Island; nearly everywhere I snorkeled there, I had to dive if I wanted a good look. It was a crash course in free diving. First I had to get over the fear of water filling my snorkel (yeah, yeah, it's not very hard to clear it), then I had to figure out how to get myself to sink, equalize the pressure in my ears, and then stay down. Those last two I'm still working on. One must be able to equalize one's ears fast when free diving, since time is short. And as far as staying down goes, the problem is I float quite well, especially when I'm holding air in my lungs. I guess it's all about finding a balance between holding more air, so I can stay down longer, and holding less air, so I can stay down (serious free divers will use weights). I like to think that my diving improved over the course of the trip, but you will probably see, as I post photos taken both by me and the Housemate, he's much better at diving, having gained experience while living in Indonesia.

Anyway, excuses aside, I managed to get a few reasonable shots at Magic Sands. But be sure to check for later posts, because each snorkel spot we went to on the Big Island was better than the last.

Here's a shot from the beach. The sand was very fine and soft, but it's called "Magic Sands" because when the surf is high, the sand all disappears, only to return later. The shoreline to either side of the beach was rocky.


The first thing I saw when swimming out was this large school of little shiny fish.


I would find more of these elsewhere on the Big Island, but this was the first time I saw these bright red pencil sea urchins.


I don't know what kind of fish this is, but it was happy just sitting there. You can also see a little of the live coral.


Cute turtle. This shot was taken by the Housemate.


This shot was taken by me just about the same time. See? I was at the surface looking down, while the Housemate got up close on the bottom. Very typical of the trip.


Coming up tomorrow: photos from a cool lava rocky beach. And remember that my first day was the least spectacular, so the best photos are yet to come.

I will note that many of my Big Island underwater photos have been treated with Photoshop CS4's auto-color, auto-tone, or in a few cases a combination of these. Part of me thinks of it as kind of like telling a lie, to tweak the coloring, but really all it's doing is revealing the scene's true colors, free from the green haze. It was kind of amazing seeing how much of a difference it made for some of the photos (and how little difference it made for others). Makes me curious to go back to my older photos and try it out with them.

NBC picks up magical drama from Ron Moore

Just one bit of news I just read that got me excited enough to feel like sharing:

NBC Universal just nabbed the drama that Battlestar Galactica's Ronald D. Moore has apparently been developing with Sony TV since May. The series is described as "an adult Harry Potter set in a world ruled not by science but by magic" (Deadline Hollywood).

As a loyal Battlestar Galactica fan, I am definitely excited to see what new projects Ron Moore is working on, especially if they are sci-fi or fantasy related. I'm a big fan of magic. I'm not sure when we should expect to see his new show on NBC (or if we'll see it at all...I know that not all pilots filmed make it to TV, and I'm not quite sure what stage this production is in right now). But whenever it pops up, I'll be sure to tune in.