By Mac Malambri
Today, I woke in time for the sunrise. Unfortunately, it was cloudy. Despite the clouds, it was still beautiful. My sunrise was followed by making pancakes for the group. I made my beloved chocolate-chip pancakes. I think people appreciated them. We all worked on our blogs, listened to Disney music, and ate pancakes together on a much more relaxing morning than the previous one.
After breakfast, we had a meeting where we discussed our plans for the next few days. Today, we will return to Hawaiian Volcanos National Park. We will drive further down Chain of Craters Road to see volcanic craters and rock formations along the coast. We then loaded up in the vans and departed.
The drive over was at first identical to the previous day. Once we entered the park, we took a left onto Chain of Craters Road. Chain of Craters Road connects the peak of Kilauea to the coast. Along the way, there are—as the name suggests—many craters. These craters form when some lava solidifies faster than the lava it surrounds. When the hot lava drains away, a deep crater is formed. These craters display the various a’a and pahoehoe lava that flowed over the area. They are very interesting geological features. They are also very unstable and like to collapse. We first went to a large crater along the road with railings and signs and all the things that our tax dollars pay the Department of the Interior to maintain. It was cool. You could see that it was vaguely a crater, but had relatively gradual walls. You couldn’t really differentiate the flow types. The second crater was just a few minutes down the road. In contrast to the very official nature of the first site, there was no parking lot or sign for the Devil’s Throat crater. Professor Knapp only knew about this crater from her work with the USGS. It is around 165 meters deep and 150 meters in diameter. Most people couldn’t really see into the crater; because of the famed instability of the crater, we had to stay about a meter from the edge. I am privileged enough to be tall enough to barely see over the edge if I leaned as far as I could. It was SO deep. I don’t know how to describe it and photos can’t do it. You can see the big blocks of pahoehoe flows and the scratchy a’a flows along the wall of the crater. Professor Knapp told us that the man who introduced her to this crater claimed that it was once a mere 20 meters in diameter and a horse once jumped across it.
We then headed to the Mauna Ulu, a secondary eruption on Kilauea. It erupted from 1969 to 1974. We stopped there primarily to use the bathroom for the last time for a while. Mauna Ulu looks like a gray ant hill that protrudes from a gray desert with rocks that randomly rises and falls like dunes. Upon further expression, the rocks are not just boring gray rocks, but instead are vesicular rocks with vibrant colors. These rocks display beautiful shades of purple, red, and gold. These rocks tend to have high iron content, given a red tint. They are surprisingly light, because they are vesicular. Vesicular rocks solidify with a lot of gas. The gases form bubbles in rocks. This leaves them porous.
Returning from the rock field, we encountered a gentleman named Tim. He showed us his beautiful necklace. He collected shells on Hawaii for 21 years to create it. It is made of what looks like miniature conch shells. Over eight days, he painstakingly threaded each shell to create this necklace of thousands of shells. We then departed for the end of the Chain of Craters Road. Along the way, we stopped to see the petroglyphs at Pu’u Loa. Traditionally, families would grind the umbilical cords of newborns into the rock. There, we ventured to see the Hole’i Arch. It was formed by the weathering of the rock by bombardment by waves.
We finally departed from the coast and made the long journey back to our house. Everyone was so tired. Caroline made these great burgers and then told us that was her first time making burgers. We finished by watching—but not finishing of course—Moana. This was a great, but exhausting day.