The park is located on the eastern side of the Big Island of Hawaii. It is a 30 minute drive south of the city of Hilo, Hawaii, near the town of Volcano, Hawaii on what was known as Volcano Road, now Hawaii 11. The park was easy to find and there was ample parking at the visitor center. However I spent only a few minutes there checking maps and 20 minutes at a safety briefing, after all I was visiting an active volcano and 4 days before my visit there was an earthquake measuring 4.1 on the Richter scale and damaging a beautiful sea cliff lookout, which was roped off as off limits, but the safety briefing was to help people who had flown thousands of miles to see this volcano survive their expected behavior climbing over walls and guard rails and ignoring don’t enter signs. 😳😐😑
The park is of course all about lava!
The islands were born of fire, literally volcanic lava pouring out of underwater volcanos for years until the mountains of piled up lava are tall enough to stick up out of the ocean. The mountains keep growing and they are frequently close together and the eventually land mass formed by the flatter lava plains in between the peaks of the volcano mountains becomes the islands.
In the Hawaiian language this process is called:
So back to this huge park that took me 4 hours to tour and over 45 minutes drive from end to end. And This park had the most amazing “You are here” signs, indicating you were in the midst of vast ancient lava flows forming huge mountains on the ocean floor with the small mountain peaks forming the large islands.
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The park was filled with amazing sites of cooled off lava flows where you could see the hardened lava rock was once liquid stone which has swirls like melted chocolate.
I gazed upon this other worldly place with amazement.
Cooled swirls of molten stone.
More swirls of liquid stone.
Large strands of liquid stone.
And the vistas were amazing with lava as far as the eye could see.
It’s important to realize that these lava flows are very thick and can be 12-100 feet tall and sometimes more. The lava flows cover the ground burning all the vegetation and boiling off the water. Yet once it cools, small plants start to grow on the surface and their job is to breakdown the lava and create lava dust or volcanic soil. Which is rich in minerals.
In some places the flat lava flows were interrupted by areaS where hot lava burst through a crack and tried to reach for the sky like a fingertip or a thumb tip.
I try to imagine what this looked like when it was red hot molten rock spurting a few feet into the air only to fall back down and other spurts landed on each other forming these mounds.
It must be amazing indeed.
We then headed to the sea cliffs and the winery.
I will put those pictures in my next post.
Thank you very much for reading my post or Mahalo Nui Loa in the Hawaiian language and Good bye for now or Aloha in Hawaiian.
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