Interestingly enough, the crater outside Volcano House (where we had breakfast the other day), looks remarkably similar to the Grand Canyon in some places. I’ve never seen the bottom of the Grand Canyon, but the sides of the crater show layers and layers of rock and color up prettily in the sunrise. However, yesterday, the entire crater was blanketed in mist and rainbows.

Yesterday we spent the day in the park. We started with that first crater, and from there went to the Ha’akulamanu (Sulpher Banks).

They weren’t terribly strong. I don’t want to think about what that might mean. Here we saw what the acid from the volcano can do to neatly stacked stones (it turns them into a pile of rubble), some orchids which were imported to the state from Asia in the sixties, and of course, suffer. It reminded me of an old Star Trek episode where Kirk and Spock encounter a large rock, or side of a hill, completely covered with sulfur. I described the episode to Ryan and he says he thinks it’s the one where Kirk fights the Gorn. Some kind of lizard humanoid battles with Kirk there.

At this point it was almost 9 am, and a ranger suggested we go directly to Nahuku, which is the Thurston lava tube, since it was Sunday and guaranteed to be really busy. So we drove the 2 or so miles over to the tube. This is a partly sanitized for consumption lava tube with lights installed and higher ceilings, snuggled deep inside the rainforest.

The tube’s walking surface was very uneven, and with all the rain, had lots of lurking puddles. I was very grateful for my hiking boots more than once, as I stumbled, in spite of the light, as I fell into yet another depression filled with water. My tennis shoes are waterproof, but they don’t do anything if the water goes up over the tops!

We climbed the stairs out of the tube, which ends right after the photo on the left, and made our way back to the car across the top of the tube in the rainforest.

Since we were already on Crater Rim Drive, we kept going and saw… you guessed it, craters!

And, there’s a lava flow from 1974:

OK, not EXACTLY the same age as I am, the flow was in July. But I can now safely say that I am older than rocks!

The craters all blurred together after that, except for one which is so old that it’s covered entirely by trees and vegetation. The others were all stark and barren by comparison.

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The Ocean!

It was misty most of the time we were on the mountain, and even as we came down a bit toward the cliffs next to the ocean, but not exactly cold. Just wet and a little breezy.

We were going to hike up the .7 mile to see the petroglyphs, but my knee started to seize and there was… well, a storm coming!

And then finally, after nearly being run off the road by an overly anxious park ranger (he even turned his lights on to force us into a pull out!), we saw the State Bird, the Nene (nay-nay)

And went to the nation’s furthest south winery:

The wine was… like most winery wine. Young, strange and in some cases, way too sweet.

But it is now TODAY! And I must leave to see if we can catch the sun on the crater.