Lava flow adventure

Adventure Location: Big Island of Hawaii, Lava flow

In mid-December a flow that originated from the Pu'u O'o vent reached the ocean. I was very excited about this new ocean entry and visible lava flow and wanted to check it out!

I have been watching the HVO website, and when I saw the flow, plus a new map showing the location of the flow, it was decided that an adventure was in order. This flow turned out to be IN THE MIDDLE of everything! Almost dead center between the end of the Chain of Craters road and the Kalapana road. After some deliberation we decided to hike out to where we could see the flow (not close enough to touch, but close enough to get some awesome photos) from the park side (Chain of Craters Road), and take some photos at sunset.

Armed with this map (or one similar, I think this is more recent), water, some snacks and our cameras we took off! We knew about how far it was (~4miles), and it didn't sound bad. We failed to take into account just how ANNOYING hiking on a lava flow can be. It was pretty slow going, not helped by the fact that I was very distracted by the older flows and some amazing textures. That was on the way out when there was still daylight. 

It was a lovely hike and we stopped about sunset to take photos from where we were. However, I did get very distracted along the way.

I hope you enjoy these photos! I found some of the textures very interesting!

Halemaumau Crater

Bench mark in the tourist holding pen at the Jagger Museum 

I am pretty sure that I have a photo of this sign or one just like it from my first visit to Hawaii when I was in high school

Begin cool geology photos. I loved the weathering on this flow

and these are some cool ropes

here are roped ropes!

and more interesting ropes

Can you tell we were hiking on pahoehoe flows?

I thought this flow had an excellent feeling of motion

these looked like a crumpled blanket

and this almost looked like an embroidery flower

I thought this flow was beautiful! 

RED! LAVA! FLOW! It has been a while

we waited for it to get dark (Also I need a better camera)

on the way back I was less distracted but still found some cool flow textures

more interesting weathering

TA DA! I may end up editing a few of the shots to make some abstract photography prints from them. But that requires time! I hope you enjoyed them!