Hot stuff

Hi everyone, Sus and I have left our temporary home at Pohoiki beach in Puna and successfully hitched the 100 miles to Spencer beach in about 4 hours. Before we made the move we decided to take a hike out to where the latest lava flow from Kilauea meets the ocean. Kilauea has been continually "erupting" to varying degrees for over 27 years, so lava is nothing new to most people who live there (in fact the area is overrun so often that they don't bother to repair many of the melted roads and highways). Boston on the other hand is nowhere near a volcanic hotspot so we wanted to see it firsthand.

There is a sign on route 130 past Pahoa that used to have town names and distances printed on it, but now they are all taped over and it just reads: END OF ROAD - 1 Mile. After the road ends there is another gravel road that winds through the debris of older lava flows and eventually leads to a strip of vegetation spared a fiery death. There is a path set back from the road that leads to the rocky coastline and from there it's a ten minute walk to the lava.

As we walked toward the plume of steam rising from the ocean the rocks beneath our feet got hotter and hotter until I thought they were going to melt the soles of my sandals. Pieces of pahoehoe were flaking off and blowing away on the sulfurous breeze. Our hearts were pounding as we approached the outlet and began to worry that any of the rocks we stepped on could give way and drop us into a cauldron of magma. At some cracks in the rock we looked down and saw them glowing hot just two feet beneath our two feet. It was exhilarating to see how these islands were formed and continue to grow inch by inch. Yesterday morning we could honestly say that we were standing on the newest land on the planet.

I'm not able to post pictures of it right now but you can see some of what we saw online at hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/images.html