“It isn’t a good volcano trip if you don’t melt some rubber off your soles,” I told Michelle. “So don’t wear your new shoes. Sturdy and comfortable, but disposable.” This clearly left Michelle feeling a bit apprehensive. She had already followed me into some situations she had regretted, and she’d learned that just because I did something, it didn’t mean that it was a good idea to follow me. But her desire to see molten lava overpowered whatever natural caution she had.
I hadn’t been together with Michelle long, but we had done enough that I knew it was becoming a serious relationship. And if I was serious about the girl, I knew I had to introduce her to Auntie Pele, Goddess of the volcanoes. Pele would let her opinion be known. I had ignored her last time, when I brought a young woman I hoped would become my lover to meet her and she pretended not to be home, throwing my offering back in my face. Then, disturbed by that and so carefully backing away from her doorstep on the exact path I had approached by, the ground collapsed and I had fallen through layer after layer of lava, as sharp as glass. Yes, I had ignored her, and wasted years of my life with this woman, who proved as sharp and treacherous as Pele had suggested she would be. This time I intended to heed her.
Along with the sturdy old shoes, Levis, and gloves, it was essential to bring the proper offerings. Seafood, and later, gin, were traditional. But I had found Pele also enjoyed dark chocolate and some good herb to smoke, just as I did. It was easy enough to tell. If you placed your offering in front of a flow and the flow stopped and grew cold, or tried to throw it onto the lava and it blew back in your face, the offering was rejected and you had best leave. If she picked it up and carried it, slowly incinerating whatever you had provided, wafting the scent to your nostrils before swallowing it, that was a clear sign she had enjoyed it. One time I had given her a couple of oysters, placing the rest of the dozen on some still hot rocks to slowly cook. Suddenly, with a creak like a long rusted hinge, the rock under the remaining oysters opened up and a tongue of lava engulfed them, slipping back into the rock as it slowly creaked closed. No one faulted her or called it greed; we knew then that there would be no injuries on that trip and traipsed fearlessly across the lava fields. I always brought her oysters if I could, after that.
But it seemed her favorite was gin. I'd realized this long before when, with my lady at the time and my son, I brought a bottle to share with her while we watched her consume a favorite beach, even as she built a new one nearby. Creation and destruction inextricably interlinked. This was in the National Park, and easily accessible by car, so a number of tourists were watching as we walked to the fresh lava to say prayers and make our offering. Pele, thank you for this beautiful island you have blessed us with, for the wonders we experience every day. Keep us safe on this journey, and please spare my family’s homes as you continue to build yours. I mentally projected the words for Pele alone. I poured some gin on the lava, and it burst into a beautiful, bright flame. My girlfriend thought her prayer, and her offering, too, was accepted, although the flame was considerably smaller. My young son was also able to get a little flame.
“What are you doing?” asked a passing tourist.
“Making our offerings to Pele,” I replied. “As you saw, She has accepted them.”
“Pele? Superstitious fools! There is only one god! Of course the alcohol burns when you pour it on hot lava!”
I simply handed the man the bottle. “Show me.”
“Watch!” the tourist commanded, pouring some gin on the lava. It sizzled and quickly evaporated. “It’s because you cooled this spot off, pouring the gin here before.” He wandered around a bit, pouring gin here and there into the reddest cracks he could find, but nothing happened.
“Don’t dump out all my gin! Give that back to me.” I snatched the now nearly empty bottle from his hand and took a swallow. Thinking you might as well finish this, Auntie, I poured the remainder onto the exact spot the intolerant gentleman had dumped nearly half the bottle, and a gigantic column of flame leapt up in the tourist’s face. We walked off across the lava field, nothing more to say. The smell of burnt hair had never been so pleasant as it was then, wafting after us on the sudden breeze. The offering was clearly accepted.
So having purchased oysters and gin for Pele, along with batteries for the four flashlights we would carry to ensure that we could walk out in the dark, Michelle and I headed up Kilauea towards Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. Our destination was Pu’u “O”, the new cone that was erupting, named for its location at an “o” on the USGS map. The name had been later changed to Pu’u O’o, trying to make it more Hawaiian, but locals still referred to it by its original name. I had no idea what the relationship was between the barren cone and the O’o, an extinct forest bird, except perhaps as it related to the barren prospects of the bird’s cousins on Maui and Kaua’i, so I, too, stuck with Pu’u “O”.
I had been present at the birth of this pu’u or cinder cone in 1983, sneaking across the lava fields with my brother. The ranger, posted to prevent exactly that, had left the observation point just before dark, confident that the group of people dressed in shorts and tee shirts, shivering in the rain, were too ill equipped to spend the night on the mountain. All that could be seen from the permitted vantage was a red glow, so the two of us ran across the lava flats the moment the ranger was out of sight, taking what little food and water the rest of the group was carrying. We thought we were invisible in the mist, dressed in black garbage bag raincoats on the black lava, but a helicopter spotted us and ordered us back on a loudspeaker. We ignored it, knowing it was too late to send someone after us. The helicopter tried several times to land and drop people off, but each time we just ran in the opposite direction. Darkness was approaching, so the rangers soon gave up and flew off.
At the time, neither of us had any experience with active volcanoes, so for safety we climbed to the top of a high pu’u, which had lava fountaining at its base in a shallow pit. In the darkness, I nearly stumbled into a fern-covered crack in the hillside, one of innumerable seemingly bottomless cracks that scarred the landscape, but the warm sulfurous steam it emitted warned me at the last moment. Jumping this fissure, we made it to the top of the pu’u, where, freezing cold in the pouring mountain rain, we built haystacks of dead fountain grass and burrowed into them. About this time a great crack opened up, several miles of bright red lava spattering in a zigzag down the rift zone from the puddle of molten rock at the foot of our perch. With a deep roar, the activity focused on a single point, a spectacular orange fountain blasting hundreds of feet into the air above the nearly flat lava plain. We watched Pele dancing on her mountain until the wee hours of the morning, dry but now stiflingly hot in the insulation of our mounds of grass. Eventually we could see a river of lava flowing down a slope into the forest, trees burning brightly, so we knew a pu’u had been formed. Exhausted from the excitement and a long day, I drifted in and out of sleep, Pele playing in my dreams so I wasn’t even sure when I was asleep or awake. Eventually I knew I must be awake, because the dance had ended, cooling deep red pools of molten lava the only light remaining. In the morning a hundred foot high hill stood where there had been a gently sloping plain the night before. That was the birth of Pu’u “O”.
After this birth day, Pu’u “O” had fountained spectacularly 45 times, building the cone to nearly 800 feet high- over twice the height of any other cinder cone on the rift. Michelle and I caught glimpses of it towering above the jungle as we drove up Kilauea volcano. I had only seen two of these later events, and the first was from many miles away as I drove to view it. The episodes were short lived, often only lasting a few hours, and that time it had ended before I was close enough to see it again. The last time it had fountained, however, I had awoken on the slopes of Kilauea to an intense red sky hours before dawn, and was able to drive to a favored vantage point only six miles from the cone before the show ended. In the pre-dawn hour, with a few others I watched the last, most spectacular blast of these fountaining episodes, a solid column of molten rock exploding nearly half a mile into the air, before dissipating into relative droplets the size of cars that rained down on the surrounding landscape in apparent slow motion. I regaled Michelle with these tales and others of my many volcano trips the entire way, feeding her anticipation and suspense.
“After that, it moved down the rift a couple of miles, building a broad shield at Kupaianaha, where there was an active lava lake for five years,” I explained to Michelle as we turned past the viewing site where I had witnessed that spectacular fountain years before, stepping on the accelerator now that I was off the public highway and no longer bound by speed limits. “But for the last ten years, the action has returned to Pu’u “O”, although it has been a steady outpouring rather than sporadic fountaining.” Michelle wasn’t responding any more. I wasn’t sure if it was trepidation at the prospect of visiting the lava lake in the rapidly approaching cone, or merely the fact that the Land Cruiser was spending more time in the air than on the ground as we flew down the rutted dirt road at eighty miles an hour. “The washboards would make this ride miserable,” I explained, assuming the latter, “but at this speed the tires only touch the tops of the ridges and it smooths out.” I could tell Michelle wasn’t buying it, and in any case she doubtless preferred to arrive rattled but alive. But our relationship wasn’t developed enough that she had the nerve to order me to slow down, so she said nothing.
From the end of the road, it was only three miles to Pu’u “O” as the crow flies. Not being birds, however, we were forced to follow the serpentine trail a fire crew had cut through the rainforest years before. It seemed the trail headed for every point of the compass, except towards the cone. At one point, it went directly away from the cone for such a long distance that many a hiker had assumed they had gotten turned around, and headed back the way they had come. But after three hours of fast hiking through dense jungle that was almost as beautiful as it was muddy, the trail broke out into a border region. Here the trees had been killed by falling hot cinder and gasses, and only a few tree ferns and some scrub dotted the grass. From there the trail made a bee line to the edge of the lava field, where we quickly arrived.
A gentle but cold rain had settled in, and I noticed the entrance to a cave in the older lava just in front of the looming wall of new a’a - the jumbled and jagged form lava takes when it has cooled somewhat on the surface, but is still moving underneath. “Let’s take a break where we can be dry,” I suggested. “We’ll be warm enough once we get on the hot stuff, but this looks like a good resting place.” The cave was larger than it appeared from the entrance. We pulled out flashlights to look deeper. As far as we could see, a broad, low-roofed cave stretched, supported at irregular intervals by a forest of columns.
“What is it?” Michelle asked. “How could something like this exist?”
“It looks like lava flowed into a forest and ponded,” I speculated. “It cooled on the surface, forming the roof, and also hardened around the trunks of the trees, forming these columns. No doubt they are hollow inside. Then a dam broke somewhere, and the lava that was still molten flowed away, leaving this five foot space between the old ground and the new surface. The roof didn’t collapse because the forest was dense enough to leave all these columns to support it, and the lava pond sat and cooled long enough that there was a thick roof. It must have been days, maybe even months, before the molten lava drained away.”
“Surely this is one of the wonders of the world!” Michelle exclaimed as we walked into the underground forest of columns. Clearly it extended for many acres, but I was afraid of getting lost in the depths and insisted we turn back before we had gone far.
“Marvelous, indeed! The amazing thing is, we may be the only people who have seen it,” I told her, putting my arm around her as we stepped back out into the cold mist.
We noticed smoke and heat waves on the edge of the a’a field to the south, so instead of heading directly to the summit of the cone as I had done before, we decided to skirt the fresh lava along the edge of the forest and try to find a fresh outbreak. Molten rock flowing into virgin jungle is a unique treat to witness, and I wanted to share it with her. But as we approached the source of the smoke, we were stopped by an enormous fissure, twenty feet wide, stretching from the wall of new a’a into the forest as far as we could see. An incandescent river of red rock was flowing from under the edge of the a’a field into this crack, the luminescent lava falls disappearing into the depths far, far below. No pond or even glow from this massive stream of lava hitting the bottom was visible, just the red ribbon becoming a thread as it fell into the depths.
Although the spot was not the most appropriate, I gave a small offering and prayer before we moved on, as I always do when I first reach molten lava.
Beautiful Pele, I ask only for our safety as we visit your home. Following the fissure, eventually we came to a spot where great blocks of rock had slumped into the crack, nearly creating a bridge across it. The jump was only a few feet, from one flat surface to another, but the bottomless depths nearly unnerved us. “I can deal with it. Let’s do it - if you think the rock is stable,” Michelle said.
“I doubt our weight could affect these massive blocks of rock,” I figured, impressed by her courage, and so we went for it.
But having reached the source of the smoke we sought, we discovered it was just a few smoldering logs on the edge of a stagnant flow. We tried to continue along the base of the wall of fresh a’a, but the tangled fallen trees, cut by the lava, made progress extremely difficult. Working our way through the jungle was more than we wanted to deal with, so we decided to climb the cone. Scrambling up the sharp and crumbly face of the a’a flow was hard enough, and once on top we saw a good mile of jumbled, jagged rock between us and the cinder at the base of the cone. The heat radiating from the top of the flow was intense, and picking our way across that unstable landscape seemed impossible, so we decided to turn back. Along the base of the wall I spotted another half buried cave entrance, and looking in saw that it was another window into the underground forest. In the depths, molten lava was pouring through the roof from the flow above, giving an eerie glow that showed the great expanse of the cavern.
“It must be a mile to where we entered before!” said Michelle. “How big is it?”
“Well, it’s getting smaller by the minute,” I noted. “What amazes me is that the roof can support thirty feet of moving, molten rock.” I crawled in just so I could say I had been underneath an active a’a flow, a claim I doubted anyone else could make, but the heat and sulfurous fumes drove me out long before I could reach the leak in the roof and make the offering I intended.
Crossing the great crack again, there was no sign that the unabated river of lava had ever reached the bottom. Was there a bottom? I supposed there must be. If the crack had reached all the way to the reservoir of magma that fed the flow, it would be coming out of the crack, not flowing in. But unquestionably it was many thousands of feet deep, or the river we were watching would have started to fill it, at least enough for us to be able to see the glow far below.
Nearly ten years before, soon after the eruption had shifted back to Pu’u “O”, I had worked out a route up the massive cone to the edge of the lava lake at the summit. Although much of the cone was the jagged a’a, hot, fast moving flows had left paths of smooth pahoehoe lava snaking down the mountain when the lava lake overflowed its rim. I’d mapped it in my mind from a vantage below and marked a relatively easy path up the pu’u with cairns, crossing only a few small stretches of a’a. A decade of pilgrims, photographers, and volcanologists had transformed this into a decent trail, so it took us less than an hour to reach the rim of the central pit once we had returned to the trailhead. Still, we were grateful for our gloves and Levis as we scrambled and fell in the short stretches of crumbly, sharp a’a. Cracks sporting an icing of yellow crystals vented warm, sulfurous gasses that seized our lungs, causing us to gag, and the fine spun volcanic glass known as “Pele’s hair” infiltrated our shoes, penetrating the stockings and causing a fiberglass-like itch around our ankles as it poked and abraded our skin.
It had been over five years since I’d hiked in to Pu’u “O”, so I was surprised to find that the lake of molten lava I expected to find at the summit had been replaced with a small pond in a much deeper pit, barely visible from the rim. More shocking, the entire southwestern wall of the cone had collapsed into the earth, a gaping hole where once there had been a mountain. We worked our way along the unstable rim of the pit to the edge of the great collapse to get a better view of the lava pond, but the dense fumes blowing through the gap obscured the view, and bursts of sulfur dioxide left us gasping for breath in spite of the moistened bandanas we breathed through.
“I’m good,” said Michelle, “I can’t take any more.” But dropping over the outside edge of the crater to escape the fumes, I noticed a distant flow cutting into the forest in the National Park, not far from where I knew a trail from Chain of Craters Road hit the recent flows.
“It isn’t a good volcano trip unless you melt some rubber off your soles,” I reminded Michelle. “We could check out the flow, then hit the trail by dark. There’ll be tourists on the road half the night, stopping for the best glimpse of an active volcano they’ll ever see. We should be able to talk someone into taking us to the Volcano House and we can get a room, or maybe we can even bribe them to take us to the Land Cruiser.”
Michelle was game, so we cut down the cone. The wind had blown the bulk of the cinder to the leeward when the
pu’u was fountaining, and since it was thus higher than the rest of the rim the lava lake had never overflowed on this side, so there was only loose cinder to contend with. Zigzagging across the steep cone, we were surprised to run into a well worn trail through the cinder, and even more surprised when, running down this easy path to make time, the trail abruptly ended at the edge of the great collapse. Stopping just in the nick of time, we proceeded more cautiously but still quickly made it to the bottom of the cone.
A broad shield of pahoehoe lava had accumulated against the base of the cone from years of vents emptying from the flanks of the pu’u. We crossed this smooth shield, skirting the base of the cone. As we rounded the cinder, a strange sight met our eyes. A collection of hornitos, some thirty feet high, spit little blobs of molten lava into the air, looking like miniature versions of the tall, skinny volcanoes one might find in a comic book set on another planet, or in the time of the dinosaurs. Hornitos form when the tube system that drains the vent is blocked, and the escaping gasses have no where to go. So, I thought, the tube system is blocked. That explains why the lava has pushed under the older a’a flow and was pouring into that crack instead of flowing to the sea. The trapped gas blasts out of cracks in the roof of the tube, carrying molten lava with it and building chimneys of spatter around the column of escaping gas, forming the hornito. Ignoring the danger of the flying lava, Michelle posed for a picture leaning against the base of the most cartoonish specimen. Soon after, it burped out an unusually large spattering of blobs, some landing where she had been standing shortly before. I felt it was time for new offerings - Thank you, Pele, for leaving her unharmed. - so we tossed up some oysters. Which were swallowed by the hornitos, when one would have thought the venting gasses would have blown them out just as it did the lava. Reassured, we continued on our way.
To the east of the hornitos was jumbled a’a and the pit. We stuck to the smooth pahoehoe on the west side, unable to cross towards the flow we sought due to the intense heat of the lava tube that was flowing southwards beneath the surface alongside of us. We were being forced well out of direction, and I was eager to get back on track. The heat seemed to dissipate somewhat by the time we reached a broad, smooth plain, so I began to cut directly towards the flow I hoped to observe. Abruptly, the lava seemed to me to become slippery.
“Careful, we must be crossing the tube now,” I warned Michelle. “The molten rubber on your soles makes it seem very slick. Follow a bit behind me, we don’t want to put too much weight on the roof of the tube, and I’m a lot heavier than you so if I don’t fall through, you won’t.”
“I don’t know about this…” said Michelle, but she dropped back and carefully followed in my footsteps.
Suddenly I could feel the earth trembling under my feet. The heat penetrated my shoes, my feet were on fire, my legs burning where the hot air blew up inside my pant legs. My soles were squishy, melting under my feet.
“Go back! Too hot!” I yelled at Michelle, who gladly turned and fled, while I quickly followed. “We’re going to have to walk out the way we came. It’ll be fine as long as we’re off the pu’u by dark,” I told her as I caught up to where she was waiting on cooler rock. Dark wasn’t far off, we’d have to hurry. Just then we heard a loud CRACK behind us. Turning to look, we saw a huge plate of lava, where I had been standing a minute before, tilt into the sky and slip into a pool of molten lava. With a series of softer cracking noises, a multitude of smaller plates followed suit, tilting on their side and slipping below the surface. The flat plain I had planned to cross was now a roiling lava lake, many acres in extent.
“At least you know when to turn back,” said Michelle. “I’ll give you that.”
I obviously wasn’t getting much credit for common sense, but I knew I had the answer I’d sought then, about Michelle. It’s going to be fiery, and it’s going to be dangerous. Well, I can take the heat.
Or so I thought… but then again, common sense obviously isn’t my strong point.