steam vents, Sulphur banks, Kilauea Caldera, petroglyphs
Ken's for dinner
This was another leisurely wake up morning, because Derek had some poking around in the electrical of the hotel to do. While he got all up in the ceilings and shit, I had a couple of cups of coffee, Gabriel had his leisurely breakfast, and I also made friends with a baby. A very unlike me activity, but he was a delightful little thing. I chatted with his mom and had a grand old time bouncing him around.
We made our way back to Volcanoes National Park and headed right for the steam vents. Gabriel's delight and fascination with all things VNP held through, and he was just thrilled to wander around.
Gabriel had a great time standing in the vents because he said, "mom! It smells like ramen!" He wasn't necessarily wrong, it kinda did smell a little ramen-y. But uh, we had to consistently remind him that standing DIRECTLY in the steam to get the full on face of ramen smell was a bad idea. Because the steam is fucking bad for you.
There's just so much of it! And it's so fucking cool! Not literally, it was warm and smelled of cheap noodles, but you know. It was neat.
LOOK AT THAT CALDERA!!!! How fucking intense a view is that??
I took so many photos of the steam. It was a bit absurd, really. One, maybe two photos of the steam does the trick.
Same with the caldera.
But clearly, I did not let that stop me from taking way more photos than necessary.
There's a lot more unnecessary photos where those came from! Both literally and figuratively.
We headed down the path to the sulfur banks next. Usually, I'm the one who plans out our days, but Derek planned everything out for our visits to VNP. No complaints from me there! I always choose the stuff I want to do, and I feel like Derek maybe doesn't get a voice for our vacations. Do I like being in charge? Fuck yeah I do! But it's also nice knowing we're doing the things he thinks are important and fun and I'm not deciding that for all of us. We also made sure to ask Gabriel what he thought was important to do while we were on big island, and he mostly just wanted to run around the lava flows. We were happy to oblige.
I think my favorite thing about VNP is how barren the land looks, but how teeming with interesting plants it is in reality.
This prickly beauty is ʻōhiʻa lehua. This gorgeous flower grows super well on lava, and it's one of the very first thing to grow on new lava flows. Right now, it's being killed in just unimaginable numbers from Rapid ʻōhiʻa death, a super insidious fungus. It kills these trees wildly fast...within a few weeks, if not faster. This plant is really abundant on the island, so it isn't critical for them yet, but things that rely on these trees, like beetles and honeycreepers, are finding themselves SOL on the homefront and their numbers ARE dwindling to critical levels. Unfuckingcool. Remember, hikers, clean your fucking boots before you travel. Clean them thoroughly. Don't traffic plants. Be responsible. Mālama 'āina.
Well thanks for telling us NOW, after about a half mile of walking through volcanic fucking fumes.
These fernies are EVERYWHERE in the islands, but they're just so interesting. I love how they curl.
Did you think we were done with the steam vents? YOU WERE FUCKING WRONG.
Aha!!! The path to the sulfur banks. Which, by the way, I've been spelling "sulphur" my entire life. Google is making me change it. Thanks, I hate it.
All of the yellow you see? SulPHur!!! And you know, it didn't even smell. I thought it was going to be awful, but it wasn't really all that bad.
Ok, so, I didn't want to shame this person, but I couldn't NOT take a picture of their knees. I have never seen a worse case of sunburn. And this person was literally the palest human I've ever seen in my life, so that isn't going to tone itself down into a glowy, dewy tan. Ever. That's just...that's just the color of their knees now. I can't even imagine how much that shit hurt. OW.
That little bridge gave us a view of the entire sulphur bank area, but I was underwhelmed with the overview because the further away you got, the less distinctive the sulphuric yellows became. They just blended into the landscape.
Seriously, this place was so fucking weird. You'd be in the middle of a sulphur desert, and then you were in the middle of a lush little copse full of interesting little plants and lots of shade.
And just as quickly, you'd pop right back out into the steam vents.
I couldn't get over it. The swiftly changing scenery was a mind fuck.
Derek wanted to go down onto the caldera floor (we took the wrong trail for that, unfortunately, but we got close!), so we wandered to the other side of the park to see another view before heading downward to the floor. There they are! The steam vents! They seemed so immense when we were standing there, but they look so tiny from just about a mile away, if that.
See? Tiny.
I wish I had had the patience to set up my tripod and put this at f/22, because I wanted these to look as texturally sharp and interesting as they did to me when I was there. But you can still tell how colorful and jaggedy the caldera is. Just...so neat.
Here's the start of the trail to the bottom. I had wanted to do the 'iki trail, but that wasn't in the cards for us. Not today, and not ever, because the weather put its foot down. This trail was a lovely jaunt down...and up...and back down again. The entire trip was an entire thing for my quads.
Well, there goes THAT idea.
I really wanted this picture to be sharp, but alas. It's subpar. Derek got a GREAT macro shot of a fully lush version of these, and I really fucking love it. I'd post it, except he hasn't processed it yet.
I looked down and saw this stuff, and I thought it looked like the hardest jigsaw puzzle ever.
I love these fuzzy guys!!! They're everywhere out here, too. I didn't see many of them in Maui, but then again, we didn't get to really hike very much in Maui.
Oh, you know, just...traveling up and down and up and down to get to the bottom of something.
And here we are. And it's....I mean. Take a look.
Have you ever felt completely alone on the planet? Like, literally alone? This is the most isolated I've ever felt, and it was both freeing and terrifying. The wind was blowing, but that's all I could hear. Gabriel was sitting behind a bush, very quietly, and I couldn't hear him, and Derek was on the way far end of the floor, tucked behind some trees, and I couldn't see or hear him, either. It was earth quiet. All I could hear was wind, and I was really aware of my heart beating and my breathing. I couldn't see anybody, I was all by myself. In a location so completely foreign and strange that it kind of made me dizzy. It was intense.
And after about five minutes, I could hear someone blaring music as they came down the trail, which, gotta be honest, I thought was a little rude. Like, you can listen to music any time, man, Maybe let's just focus on nature sounds. I wanna hear some Return to Innocence shit IN MY HEAD, not from your fanny pack, Barbara.
I went and harangued Derek that it was time to go because it was starting to rain, and we still had quite the trek up to make, and off we went.
UGH. Stairs. Stairs all the way.
We saw these boulders on the way down, but I wanted to snag a picture of them on the way back. For scale, Gabriel is 5'10. That's one big fuckin' rock.
Derek and I stopped to take pictures of something or other, and Gabriel forged ahead (very unlike him, but we weren't mad at his gusto!), and when we caught up to him, he was intently looking into the thick of the woody surroundings. He excitedly pointed out these little guys: Kalij Pheasants!!!
Calm down, little lady, I just want to be your personal paparazzo!! Don't tell your husband!
Oh no. He knows.
Could he look at me with any more disapproval? I think not.
No no!!! Don't go! You're both so beautiful!!!!
But they left. We saw another mated pair (or the same one?) a little further up the trail, but they were far more camera shy.
A MILE OF THIS NONSENSE. Great workout, just not all that fun. Especially when I felt bullied by Derek's incessant need to be like...expedient. Gabriel was content to saunter his way back up, and I was happy to be dragged by the ears or arms or something else that didn't involve actually walking, but Derek was like, all into using his legs or some shit. I kept pace with Derek QUITE UNHAPPILY. Not because I'm lazy, but because I had developed one hell of a fucking blister on my ring toe. The one next to my pinky (people who wear toe rings should be shot on sight, so calling it my ring toe is a bit of a misnomer). It was MASSIVE. I have a great pair of Merrells that I got for literally 25 dollars, but they're a half size too large, and all of the walking we had been doing kind of ruined my toe's life. I was hurting for sure.
I didn't want to be a downer for the rest of the day, but my toe hurt so bad that I was seriously ready to throw in the towel and stay in the car while Derek and Gabriel wandered around. Instead, we took the hour long drive down to the petroglyph trail, hoping the rest would leave me in good enough shape to walk the short (we thought) trail to the petroglyphs without too much discomfort.
Guys.
It was not a short trail.
It was, however, well worth the effort.
This tree is on the scorched lava tracks coming down the mountain. Anybody who knows me knows I'm kinda obsessed with ratchet ass lookin' trees (There's a reason I have one tattooed on my forearm!), and this tree....almost all of the trees here, honestly, were like, majestically ratchet. I don't know how they manage such an aesthetic, but they do, and I want that to be MY aesthetic from now on. Glamorous trash monster is great, but majestically ratchet feels more modern. I'll work on it.
This interesting tree was at the start of the trail I wanted one good tree shot. Just one. I sat here for about twenty minutes, trying to figure out the right lens, the right angle.
Got it, I think.
Gabriel walked with me for most of the trail. Derek had gone ahead, because I was fucking around for too long with the scraggly tree. I caught up to him looking at this mass of rocks, and I said, "wow, it looks like it's covered in nets!" and he agreed, and we exclaimed to each other about how it is not, in fact, covered in nets, it just...looks that way.
Nature is fucking cool. Look at that shit! What's cooler than this??
There's Gabriel, leaving me to eat his dust, as well, because I was taking too long trying to get interesting photos of rocks.
The petroglyphs were so fucking cool. It was really wonderful to walk around and learn small snippets about what made this area so special.
A small bit of information, for those of you playing the home game:
I really wanted to find and link a Hawaiian perspective on what makes this area so significant, but I couldn't find any (I looked for about an hour, and I could have spent more time, but I have so much stuff to do that I couldn't really justify more time). There was a woman talking story at the park about rats running off with piko and that being a sign that the child would grow up to be a thief, and I want more of that.
I literally have dozens more photos from the petroglyph field. Everything there was beautiful and wonderful. Eddie Izzard has a joke where he talks about how Stonehenge is in the perfect area for its significance, and I feel the exact same way about where these are located. It's perfect (and I wondered if the site was chosen for precisely that reason, or if it was like, centrally located and just...easiest for everybody to get to. I may never know). Moody, very serious, very still and important feeling. I'm sure I was more projecting than anything else, but that's just fine.
That was really it for day five. We did go to Ken's again, and I am happy to report that it delivered twice in a row, unlike Pineapple's, which was awful, as many great historians have said.
Gabriel fell asleep on the way back to Hilo. We ran his ass ragged as often as we could, it was a blast.
There's Gabriel, with the most massive stack of sugar covered pancakes I've ever fucking seen. I had to make him promise to only eat half of the whipped cream and "fruit" (there's an entire mess of syrup strawberries hiding behind the domes of whipped cream) because I was worried he'd go into a fucking diabetic coma.
I got the same thing I got last time, because it was pretty much the only thing I could eat on the menu. Why fuck with a sure thing?
Our days became less packed with stuff, because weather was starting to really hinder us, and uh, things were starting to close because of coronavirus. Moving on to day six! Almost time to go back home, and I'll be honest, I'm pretty excited to move away from editing these fucking photos and writing about them. It's really fucking time consuming.
