Another from that trip more than a year ago. We’re getting very near the end…
It looks like it’s going to be a nice day. Bits of blue sky are showing thru the clouds here and there, so we go up to Kilauea one more time.
We show the gate attendant our receipt from several days ago. “We’re getting our money’s worth out of this. This is our fifth visit.”
She smiles a sincere smile on her face. “Have a good time.”
The clouds begin to thin. The sky is mostly blue. We drive slowly along the narrow asphalt road thru the rainforest, happy that there is no rain.
“Look!” I say, pointing out the window.
Beyond the trees, for the first time we can clearly see the slopes of Mauna Loa. Today there is no mist floating thru the woods. There are no clouds concealing its distant summit. The weather is mostly clear, and there it is, sunlight bathing its lower slopes, great black shadows on its upper slopes.
No, those are no shadows but rather reat black stains of black lava. Lava that some time in the past pushed out of fissures, running down the side of the volcano, cooling before it reached the bottom. We can see where the flow twisted and turned with the contours as it ran downhill. And we can see where it pooled in places, forming lava lakes high on the slopes.
This mountain is really, really big. All the descriptions say this, but it is hard to appreciate its enormity without being there. Even from this distance, we can’t capture the whole volcano in a single camera image. It fills the horizon from left to right.
And look! There in the distance beyond Mauna Loa. There’s Mauna Kea.
And holy cow, look! There are the telescopes! We were there standing beside them just the other day (although as you might remember, even though we looked back in this very direction, we didn’t notice Mauna Loa which looms before us now).