Take a Hike for the Best View of Hawaii Park

Your first impression of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, when you see all the turnouts and parking lots placed near scenic attractions, is that it was engineered with the automobilist in mind.

There is lots of lava-built scenery to view, nearly 400 square miles’ worth, and since we live in a let’s-see-the-park-in-an-afternoon age, it’s perhaps inevitable that the average stay in this national park is only four or five hours.

About 2 1/2 million people a year visit Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, but few stay. Rangers call it the “flow-through nature of the park.” The one hotel in the park has but 36 rooms, and the campground is rarely filled.

Without a doubt, hikers get the best look at the park. It’s dominated by Kilauea Volcano, which steams, bubbles and generally frets. One imagines that Pele, the fire goddess who--legend has it--lives in the Pit, is an exceptionally high-strung woman, forever on the edge of explosion.

The Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes dominate the park, but even the most casual hiker soon realizes that there is lots more to see.

Hawaiian chieftains of old divided the island into communities, each one granted a portion of the lower slopes to grow taro, the higher forest for canoe wood and some coastline for fishing. The park preserves a little of each kind of scenery.

Hikers can explore the naked sandscape of the Ka’u Desert, passing over mobile sand dunes of ash and pumice. A hike along the crater rim shows the profound difference between the windward and leeward sides of the volcano. The tradewinds bring copious rainfall, allowing a young rain forest to recapture a lava field.

If lava fields, a desert and a rain forest aren’t enough to explore, the national park also boasts a black-sand beach, the result of hot lava meeting the cold Pacific and exploding into fragments of basalt. The surf crushed the basalt into sand.

Hikers can trek 120 miles of park trail, ranging from the spectacular--a pathway up Mauna Loa--to the silly--a stroll through Thurston Lava Tube, once a conduit for molten lava and now an electrically lit tourist attraction with all the charm of a subway. The six-mile-round-trip Halemaumau Trail crosses the floor of Kilauea crater to Halemaumau, a crater within the crater. One of the most popular of the park’s paths, this interpreted nature trail offers an intimate look at the forces of vulcanism.

Another trail providing a graphic illustration of the power of the volcano is Devastation Trail. This half a mile boardwalk path leads through a ghostly ohia forest battered by a 1959 Kilauea eruption. Some trees lost their leaves, others had trunks scorched. Toppled by the prevailing tradewinds, many of the fire-killed ohia trees fell in the same direction, marking the great wind’s path.

Nature’s power to recover from catastrophe is amazing. Some ohia survived being buried under 10 feet of pumice. Completely denuded trees produced new leaves within a year of eruption. Aerial roots--a mystery to botanists--developed on some of the pumice-buried trees.

One of the park’s most distinct trails is the one-mile loop through Kipuka Puaulu, a 100-acre island of older lava that has been surrounded by more recent lava flows. The lava from Hawaii volcanoes often meanders, rather than explodes, leaving patches of land untouched. The Hawaiians call these patches kipukas , islands of vegetation surrounded by barren lava.

Since a kipuka is cut off from nearby ecosystems, seeds and animals are isolated from their kin. Over a period of hundreds, even thousands, of years, new trees, shrubs and insects evolved whose entire planetary distribution is restricted to a space of a few acres.

One of my favorite trails--and perhaps the park’s least-traveled one--is the Ka’u Desert Trail, which crosses a desolate expanse of ash and cinder. This path is marked by ahu, mounds of stone.

The few plants able to live on this land are those managing to take root in cracks in the lava sheets or behind shade-giving, wind-deflecting boulders. Sulfur dioxide and chlorine fumes from Kilauea waft across the desert, adding to the adverse conditions for plants, animals and hikers.

In 1790, some of King Kamehameha’s troops were marching through the desert when Kilauea exploded. Alas, the troops met an unhappy end. Toxic gases from the exploding volcano engulfed the soldiers and killed them.

Along Ka’u Desert Trail, hikers can still see prints of the soldiers’ bare feet preserved in a bed of volcanic ash. As wind stirs the desert sands, some of the ancient footprints are buried, while others are exposed.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is 30 miles southwest of Hilo. Highway 11 takes you right into the park. Kilauea Visitor Center, open daily, has great museum displays about the volcanoes. Maps and guidebooks are on sale, and rangers can suggest hikes and provide the latest trail information.

Very experienced backpackers may want to make the 36-mile round trip to the top of 13,250-foot Mauna Loa. The trail leads through subtropical forest up into the lifeless world of the mountain’s lava-covered flanks. In the crater of the volcano is a lunar surface, pockmarked with spatter cones, sulfur vents and patches of snow that remain year-round in places shielded from the sun.

If you’re an avid hiker, you could probably spend an enjoyable week getting to know Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. “Here was room for the imagination to work,” exclaimed Mark Twain in his enthusiastic description of Kilauea crater.

Hiking / Hawaii Volcanoes National Park Halemaumau, Devastation, Kipuka Puaulu, Ka’u Desert Trails * Where: Big Island of Hawaii * Length: 1-6 miles round trip * Terrain: Lava fields, rain forest * Highlights: Close-up look at volcano crater * Degree of difficulty: Moderate * Precautions: Difficult footing, sulfur fumes * For more information: Call Hawaii Volcanoes National Park at (808) 967-7311