For this day, the plan was to stay out of the ocean and venture over to the Other Side of the island to check out the town of Volcano and Volcano National Park. It’s the national park where an active volcano is going off and lava is flowing into the ocean. Or, it was, at least until very recently.
For those of you who don’t know, the Big Island, Hawai’i, is made of 5 volcanos. I believe all are active, but at least Mauna Kea is dormant. Anyway, the hot spot that powers these volcanoes spawned the entire island chain, and the largest volcanoes on the big island rise some 50,000+ ft up from the sea floor crust. This makes them the tallest mountains in the world measured in this way, I think. Probably. Whatever, look it up on wikipedia, I don’t feel like it because I’m tired.
Anyway, the topography of the Big Island can cause some interesting weather patterns. For example, the east side of the Big Island is a rain forest. It rains like 150″+ per year. The west side, where we stayed and spent the most of our time this trip, gets like 10″-20″. If you do the subtraction, the difference is large.
Why is all of this relevant? Well, we knew seeing the volcano was something we wanted to do from the beginning of the vacation. However, when we checked the weather forecast the day we showed up to the Big Island, the weather forecast for the National Park was rain as far as the Google could see. We decided to go visit on this day because the weather by us wasn’t going to be that great. Turns out it would have been wayyyyyyy wayy better to not get all the way to the park.
The drive was about 90 minutes, and it was amazing how quickly the vegetation changed once we got to the other side of Mauna Loa (that’s the bigass volcano in the South).
Because of all of the rain clouds, we saw some nice rainbows on the way:
We stopped at a little beach park on the way once we got to the other side of Mauna Loa, and that was pretty cool. Here are some artsy shots I took:
Now folks, when you see a google rain forecast for a place you’ve never been to, it’s hard to know what to expect. Will it be a gloomy day with intermittent showers? Will it just be raining a little bit all day? Will it be a reasonably clear day with monsoon downpours here and there? It’s hard to know, but the hope is that there will be breaks in the action such that you can at least see some of Volcano National Park. Wrong…wrong…
The weather was a constant rain stream with occasional torrential downpour. It was like being outside during a tropical storm. You probably can’t tell from the following picture, but the parking lot of the visitor center was starting to flood. We got super soaked in just a few seconds. I did find out that I need a new rain coat, so that’s good.
We ran out to two overlooks to try to see the crater/caldera of the active volcano. There is currently no magma to be seen. The volcano must be taking an extended vacation like I wish I was doing. Here is the only photo I took worth showing:
What was crazy is that a large region of the crater is off limits because of wayyyyy too much sulfur gas n stuff. Probably about as healthy as the air here in SLC during our temperature inversions. Zing.
We didn’t want to spend the day getting wet around the park, so we cut our losses and headed back towards our airbnb. The new plan was to get some lunch, then stop at the south point of the island, which is the southernmost point of the US. Key West is a whole 5 degrees short. We had to pass this point to get to the Volcano National Park. We stopped at this really dope restaurant that I didn’t get a great picture of.
This restaurant must be sufficiently off the tourist path because the prices were extremely reasonable. Big burgers for 10 bucks. Poke bowls for 8 bucks. Pitcher of delicious Kona beer for 20 bucks. Pretty sweet. Bae got a bunch of poke, some kimchi octopus, and some baby octopus. I got a fat burger because I was real hungry, but I munched on some of that delicious octopus. I would 10/10 recommend this place…just remember that every restaurant you can go to outside of Kona will be very slow. It’s a pretty slow pace around these parts.
With our stomachs full of delicious food, we headed for the South Point of the island. It was SO windy!!!! Like, 40-60mph gusts. Crazy. Here are some photos of that stuff.
We also did some modeling of our own:
Here is the Garmin of that walk about so you can see exactly where we were. The crazy thing about this walk is that we were all pretty soaked from our short journey in Volcano National Park, since you know, it was a hurricane there. Because of the wind and warm weather, we dried out almost instantly here.
After tooling around here for a bit, it was time to begin our adventure. We were to embark on a 2.5 mile hike out to the famous Green Sand Beach. I guess this beach was created in some volcanic crater thing, then the olivine stays around while the other sand/rock stuff leaves, resulting in this green sand beach. It was a hike suggested to us by several people, including the Internet. On one website that we read the author stated that beach-seekers should walk and not drive in an effort to save the landscape. Well guess what, folks? So many people were offering shuttle rides in their beat up trucks. And also guess what? The landscape was torrrrreeeeeee up. I guess at some point there were some gates and stuff, but those did not survive long.
So trucks and jeeps just sort of free ride over the landscape now. As soon as you park at the trail head, people will ask you if you want to spend $20 a person to ride out. Obviously, we weren’t going to do that.
Fortunately, because there were now so many roads now cut through this part of the island, it was very safe to walk to the green sand beach. The trucks went one way and all the people went others. It was a hilariously windy day, and the seas were so rough. I carried all the snorkeling gear out to this beach just in case, but that ended up being wasted effort.
It was a relatively hot and windy hike, but definitely worth it. The views of this beach were pretty neat as we approached.
It was more of a dark green, at least on a day like today, but here is a photo to try and highlight what the sand was like.
Because the water was so rough, there wasn’t a whole lot to do besides people watch. Funnily enough, there was a group of people at the beach that we saw at the South Point. They were walking down the cliff to snorkel when we were leaving the South Point to hike here. It looked way too rough to do that, and apparently they had to have bailed almost immediately and then drove to this spot. The group was like 4 clueless tourists with a guide who seemed to kind of know what he was doing, but was clearly just hitting on these two chicks. This made the time at the beach pretty entertaining, especially when it came to watching this one dude getting crushed again and again by the waves.
Here are a few more photos of what things looked like down there. Not pictured is the sea turtle that was hanging out just past the breakers.
Here is the Garmin of that hike out. It was definitely worth the hike. At least it wasn’t pouring down rain. It was also pretty neat to walk along the rough sea. A lot of times you would get sprayed by some big wave like 200 ft away. This place must get seriously weathered, man.
Anyway, by the time we got back to the car, it was getting close to 1700, so we wanted to start getting back to the house. We were able to get back just in time to grab another sunset pic.
Definitely another great day!!! My final thoughts for the reader is that if you want to go to Volcano National Park, really think about the weather. If it’s going to be raining hard, there really isn’t much you can do.