Volcano National Park, Hawaii
These are various pics from around the park, some are from a chopper, some down at the Pacific coast, etc.
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The Death March of Pui Pui (that's Hawaiian for Brundle)
These are pictures from a day hike that turned into a day, night, and morning hike, we (myself and Tom Kincaid) started out at 10 am to hike 9-10 miles to the base of the active volcano through miles of lava fields, over "dormant" volcanoes, around huge craters, through a bit of rain forest, finally into the devastated area around Pu'U O'o, the active volcano that's been spewing lava since 1983. It took us about six hours to get the 10 miles to the base, we went about 3 miles past the end of the known trail and finally stopped at the skull and crossbones sign, I wanted to go on (stupidly, I was so tired I was having trouble walking and I wasn't even considering the fact that we had to go back thru all this lava for about 10 miles) but wiser heads prevailed and we decided to head back. (most of these pics have pop up text when you leave the mouse over the photo)
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Then the sun went down and we had to make it back with miner's lights and a pen light. The trail markers are called Ahus, and guess what? they are small piles of black lava that look very similar to the other endless miles of black lava. Also, these little piles of rock are everywhere, sometimes it seems random; different side trails and older trails that are no longer active due to lava flow, etc. It was very slow going in the pitch dark, trying to find the trail, then, when it couldn't get any worse, it did, it started raining and the "dormant" volcano we were on, began to steam and soon we were in a dense fog cloud. We made very little progress for the next two hours, then realized that we had circled the crater rim and gone back down the way we had just came, not good. Keep in mind that at this point we'd been hiking for close to 12 hours straight and my f--kin' feet and legs were killing me. We finally got back on the correct trail and made it the last 3 miles in the dark fairly uneventfully and back to our car about 1am.
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So much for the day hike, we were hiking for 15 hours and 20-21 miles in the lava fields with cracks, crevices, holes, old crumbling lava tubes, sulfur vents, craters, Pahoehoe lava, Aa lava, you name it, oh yeah and the last 7 hours was in the dark, rain and fog. Tom said matter of factly "I don't know about you, but that was fun" I did not agree with this assessment, but I'm glad we did it.
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