Hawai'i Work Trip Day 7 (Friday)
We got up on the early side, ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant one more time to use up most of our food credit, and then checked out so we could drive back to Volcanoes National Park.
Sadly, the weather was not so nice -- cold and rainy and windy. We stopped up at the Jagger Museum again since supposedly the crater was supposed to be more active, but we still didn't see any lava.
We hiked the Mauna Ulu trail down to an overlook. Supposedly, on a clear day we would have been able to see Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and the ocean. Instead, we could see the other side of a small crater, and it was hard to read the trail guide because we were getting rained on and it kept getting wet. It was, as usual, interesting to read about people almost getting caught by eruptions and having to dive off behind viewing platforms.
We did see some weird rock formations:
Lava formation.
Also, a lot of the gravel underfoot was really iridescent, which was cool.
After that, we hiked Devastation Trail, which despite the name is a nice paved trail. It goes and overlooks Kilauea Iki, where we had hiked on Tuesday, and let us get a good look at the cinder cone, Pu'u Pua'i. Also more fiddlehead ferns.
This handsome bird, as well.
I think a pheasant?
It was hopeful we might feed it. We did not.
After that we decided to walk down part of the Crater Rim drive that was closed to cars -- you could still walk another mile down past the car crossing. First my dad didn't believe me about which paths were closed so we walked in the woods a bit and then got stuck and had to turn around, but then we walked down the road. It was nice at first, but my feet got sore from walking on the asphalt.
From there we were a little closer to the lava, but not nearly close enough to actually see anything.
We still had a little time before dark, so we drove up north of the visitor center to the Kīpukapuaulu rainforest trail. It was a nice trail, complete with numbers, but there were no guides so we just had to make up what the guide might have said about each one. The ecosystem was different than where we'd walked before -- much more jungly and with some absolutely enormous trees.
By this time it was getting closer to dark, so we headed to our hotel in Hilo. We foolishly decided to walk to a Thai restaurant nearby, but there were not really sidewalks, it was pouring, and then the restaurant was full. So we got takeout. It was so much food that we could easily have shared a single one and probably still had leftovers.
I wrote all my postcards then, even though we were leaving the next day and would therefore beat all them home. I always do this.
I was tired but it turned out we had only walked 27k steps, which is a fair amount but not super unreasonable. But maybe the 111 stories fitbit claims we climbed was part of it.