Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

We stayed in the park at the cabins. It was exciting hiking through the caldera. I walked inside a lava tube

...is incredible

There’s a lot of interesting and beautiful areas you can explore here, but be prepared for lots of walking! A good pair of shoes is a must, since the dry lava beds are very jagged and it’s very easy to trip on the cracks. A bottle of water, flashlight, and a camera are good to bring too!

Go early and take jeans, hiking boots, and a flashlight so you can walk to the lava flow.

i hiked the lava field to the flow during a full moon. i didn’t need any other light that the moon. the mountainside was glowing red and the light glistened on the water as the molten lava boiled the ocean water. the smell of sulphur and phosferous was intense and beautiful. I will never forget it as long as I live. You should definitely try to plan a full moon hike if you are visiting the big island. Spectacular!

There are a number of things that I hope to see in my lifetime. An actively flowing volcano is one of them. I figure that this is probably one of my best chances to see one.

I’ve always been fairly terrified of volcanoes. What better place to overcome a fear than visit a national park dedicated to said fear. ;)

So I am on vacation in Hawai’i, visiting the Volcano National Park. Trip on a bed of lava (cooled of course), manage to jab my knee and I needed to go to the Hilo emergency room and get my knee cleaned up and a stitch put in. This was half way through my vacation so for the rest of the time, swimming required that I wrap my knee in plastic wrap! Worth a visit though.

OK, OK, I have heard it before – when you live on an island your entire way of looking at things can tend to change. I live on the island on O’ahu and I can drive from one side of the island to the other in about an hour.

I went to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on a recent trip over to visit my brother on the big island of Hawaii. I have lived over here for five hears and I just have not found the time to go to HVNP at all.

If I find myself over in Hawaii I am usually out on a boat catching Ono to feed my friends with or at the Cabin in Hilo shooting wild boar and chilling at the water fall. This time I decided to do the tourist thing.

HVNP is awesome for about an hour. Shortly after that I found it boring, I mean it is a huge volcano that has tons of lava fields and some of the most interested geological sites to study volcanic activity in the world. This is interesting if you are a geologist of some sort of geological phenomenon fanatic – but I am not. I will say that this place is worth going to at least once. I will never go again by myself, but I am willing to take others if they want to go.

Quick note, if you have asthma you may want to give this one a pass as the volcanic gasses and steam can cause you to trigger an asthma attack.

I took a helicopter ride above the active volcano, as well as walked around the area. Everything about the place seemed untouched and ghostly almost.