Day 2 – Volcano

Friday, April 2, 2021

We tried to sleep in, but the local time is four hours faster than Mountain Time, so it was a tall order. Before breakfast, we took a short walk around Lili’uokalani Park near the hotel. (Lili’uokalani was the Kingdom of Hawai’i’s last queen. Popular with her people, she instituted programs to give them more power. She ruled from 1891 to 1893, until the United States overthrew the government of Hawai’i and made it into a territory.) There was a nice swimming beach with tan sand and black rock outcrops. In Hawai’i, black or green sand comes from pounded volcanic glass and rock, and white sand comes from sea life, mainly corals and shells. Tan beaches are a mixture. At the edge of an algae-filled tide pool, we admired a pair of kolea (Pacific golden plovers, Pluvialis fula). These small shorebirds are one of Hawai’i’s few migrant species and make a marathon 3000-mile journey between Hawai’i and Alaska each year, with three or four solid days of flying each way.

Ken’s House of Pancakes, a Hilo landmark diner, has been “jammin’ since 1971.” For breakfast, I enjoyed my first authentic Hawaiian loco moco (Loco moco is a hamburger patty over a bed of rice, topped with mushroom gravy.), and Joseph had crab cake eggs Benedict. The coffee at Ken’s was weak, and we’re self-confessed coffee snobs, so we tried a nearby kiosk called Just Crusin’ Coffee. Their brew was no stronger, but the dirty chai was tasty. We visited the Hilo Farmers Market, where we bought some longan fruit, apple bananas, and an enormous Hawai’i avocado. Every color of produce filled this classic tropical market. Before leaving town, we stopped by “Two Ladies Mochi,” where I ordered some ginger mochi, only made on Fridays. I also ordered a signature strawberry mochi, crafted with adzuki bean paste, and fresh pear mochi, made with green tea. All were excellent! Photos below, Jammin’ since 1971 and the colorful Hilo Farmers Market

Though we traveled less than thirty miles from Hilo to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, we rose in elevation nearly four thousand feet. The ecological changes were obvious as we climbed the the slopes of Kilauea. Hilo is a true tropical rainforest, but the town of Volcano is more temperate with a mixture of native trees and tree ferns. The Volcano Inn, a bed and breakfast, was a lucky find. We stayed on the second floor of the annex in the “Lava Room,” with big picture windows that overlooked the rainforest. The room was welcoming with fresh anthurium flowers and orchids on the table. 

After settling in our room, we left to visit Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. First, we stopped at a small store in Volcano Village for some snacks, including peppered tuna jerky (yum), Maui style onion potato chips (yummier), and Kona Brewing Company Castaway IPA (yummiest). The photos below, left to right: fiddlehead from a tree fern in the rainforest, flamingo flower, uluhe (false staghorn fern), and a tiny Brahminy blind snake.

Kilauea has, in my estimation, the second best volcano name in the world (surpassed only by Iceland’s “Grimsvotn.”) Kilauea’s last eruption was 35 years long and manifested mainly as reliable lava flows from the Pu’u O’o Crater on the East Rift Zone. All that ended with a big eruption at the summit crater (Halema’uma’u) in 2018. There was no lava in the park until December 2020, when the Halema’uma’u Crater began to ooze lava. However, the crater had become so deep that no lava was visible from publicly accessible areas when we were there. The National Park Service did not widely advertise this or they may have risked losing visitors until the end of 2021, when the crater’s lava lake is expected to fill up and become visible from the caldera’s rim. The caldera was formed around 500 years ago, and it houses the crater, which rises and collapses, and fills with lava and drains, over time. Though the crater was over 1200 feet deep, and we couldn’t see lava, we could see and smell clouds of volcanic fumes and admire sulfur cliffs, fissures, and steaming vents from the rim trail. Photos of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, below, left to right: sulfur cliffs, tiny sedges and other plants growing near the summit, the edge of the Halema’uma’u Crater from the caldera rim, and a native ohi’a lehua tree in bloom.

In a light rain, we hiked three or four miles around the edge of the caldera, enjoying the native ohi’a forest. There were several beautiful birds, including a bright red ‘apapane (crimson honeycreeper, Vestiaria coccinea), and we heard the calls of many others. We saw a tiny bird that was possibly a Hawaiian ‘amakihi (common honeycreeper, Hemiagnathus virens) that tumbled onto the trail and flew away in about half a second. The forest near the crater rim was a striking sight with the ohi’a’s bright green leaves, scarlet flowers, and dark bark adorned all over with tufts of light green lichens. Back at the Volcano Inn, we enjoyed our snacks and beer, relaxing in our cozy room until darkness and silence swallowed everything.