Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.

Kīlauea Iki is a crater next to the main summit caldera of Kīlauea in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park on the big island of Hawaii. This crater was a lava lake in 1959 with fountains spewing molten lava up to 1900 feet in the air. This activity lasted for several months until the fountains fizzled out in November of 1959.

Today, visitors can view the crater from the Kīlauea Iki Overlook. There is no longer molten lava here and the crater is vast (though compared to the main crater, it’s small or ‘Iki’.) It’s a mile long and 400 feet deep.

The 2018 eruption and its accompanying earthquakes damaged the Kīlauea Iki Trail. It was still…

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Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park: Steam Vents

National Parks With T

Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.

After visiting Volcano House and the park’s visitor center in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, our tour continued on to the Steam Vents parking lot. We walked through a grassy meadow to the caldera’s edge.

From this paved path, we could see steam billowing out of the earth in places. A few feet down, the ground is so hot that trees can’t take root here, but the tall grasses thrive.

The steam vents are caused by groundwater seeping through to the hot volcanic rock below. When it makes contact with the hot rocks, it is expelled back up through fractures in the earth as steam.

At Steaming Bluff, a cliff overlooking the caldera…

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Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park: Volcano House

National Parks With T

Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.

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Volcano House is a historic lodge in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the rim of Kilauea’s Halema’uma’u crater. The hotel began as a simple shelter in 1846, 30 years after the park was established.

In 1866, the shelter was replaced with a four bedroom hotel and hosted famous guests, including Mark Twain. Twain wrote about it in his autobiographical travelogue of some of his ealry adventures.

The hotel burned down in 1940 and was rebuilt as a 24-room lodge a year later.

When our cruise ship docked in Hilo, we took an excursion with Robert’s Hawaii to the National Park. Our fist stop was to the visitor center. After looking at the…

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