Hiking in Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park

By John McKinney, The Trailmaster

Your first impression of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, when you see all the turnouts and parking lots placed near scenic attractions, is that it was engineered with the automobile in mind. There is lots of lava-built scenery to view, nearly 400 miles worth, and cars help you see it, but without a doubt hikers get the best view of the park.

The national park is dominated by Kilauea Volcano, which steams, bubbles and generally frets. One imagines that Pele, the fire goddess who-legend had it-lives in the Pit, is an exceptionally high-strung woman, forever on the edge of explosion.

Last year Kilauea Volcano showed why its one of the world's most active volcanoes. Park visitors were treated to spectacular vistas of a fiery flow. Sometimes as many as 4,000 volcano enthusiasts came in the evening to view what became known as The Mothers Day Flow.

True, the Kalauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes dominate the park, but even the most casual hiker soon realizes that there is lots more to see. Hikers can explore the naked sandscape of the Ka'u Desert, passing over mobile sand dunes of ash and pumice.A hike along the crater rim shows the profound difference between the windward and leeward sides of the volcano. The tradewinds bring copious rainfall, allowing a young rain forest to recapture a lava field.

If lava fields, a desert and a rain forest aren't enough to explore, the national park also boasts a black-sand beach, the result of hot lava meeting the cold Pacific and exploding into fragments of basalt. The surf crushed the basalt into sand. Hikers can trek 120 miles of park trail, ranging from the spectacular pathway up Mauna Loa to strolls through a lava tube.

The six-mile round trip Halemaumau Trail crosses the floor of the Kilauea crater to Haleamaumau, a crater within the crater. One of the park's most popular of the park's paths, this interpreted nature trail offers an intimate look at the forces of vulcanism.

Another trail providing a graphic illustration of the power of the volcano is Devastation Trail. This short boardwalk path leads through a ghostly ohia forest battered by a 1959 Kilauea eruption. Some trees lost their leaves, others had trunks scorched. Toppled by the prevailing tradewinds, many of the fire-killed ohia trees fell in the same direction, marking the great wind's path.

Nature's power to recover from catastrophe is amazing. Some ohia survived being buried under 10 feet of pumice. Completely denuded trees produced new leaves within a year of eruption. Aerial roots - a mystery to botanists - developed on some of the pumice-buried trees.

One of the park's most distinct trails is the one-mile loop through Kipuka Puaulu, a 100-acre island of older lava that has been surrounded by more recent lava flows. The lava from Hawaii volcanoes often meanders rather than explodes, leaving patches of land untouched. The Hawaiians call these patches kipukas, islands of vegetation surrounded by barren lava.

Since a kipuka is cut off from nearby ecosystems, seeds and animals are isolated from their kin. Over a period of hundreds, even thousands of years, new trees, shrubs and insects evolved whose entire planetary distribution is restricted to a space of a few acres.

One of my favorite trails - and perhaps the park's least traveled one - is the Ka'u Desert Trail, which crosses a desolate expanse of ash and cinder. This path is marked by ahu, mounds of stone. The few plants able to live on this land are those managing to take root in the cracks in the lava sheets or behind shade-giving, wind-deflecting boulders. Sulfur dioxide and chlorine fumes from Kilauea waft across the desert, adding to the adverse conditions for plants, animals and hikers.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is thirty miles southwest of Hilo. Highway 11 takes you right into the park. Kilauea Visitor Center, open daily, has great museum displays about the volcanoes. Maps and guidebooks are on sale, and rangers can suggest hikes and provide the latest trail information.

Very experienced backpackers may want to make the 36-mile round trip to the top of 13,250 -foot Mauna Loa. The trail leads through subtropical forest up into the lifeless world of the mountain's lava-covered flanks. In the crater of the volcano is a lunar surface, pock-marked with spatter cones, sulfur vents and patches of snow that remain year-round in places shielded from the sun.

If you're an avid hiker, you could probably spend an enjoyable week getting to know Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. "Here was room for the imagination to work", exclaimed Mark Twain in his enthusiastic description of Kiauea crater.

For more information:
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, (808) 985-6000
Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, (800) GO-HAWAII

For daily updates on the Kilauea eruption, log on to the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaii Volcano Observatory.