Lava Day

We spent today in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, starting out in the morning.  The first thing we did was walk through a lava tube.  They are formed when molten lava flows along and the bottom and sides of the lava begin to cool, while the center lava remains a liquid.  Then the top cools and you have a "pipe."  When all the liquid has finished passing through, you have an empty tube.  Lava tubes can be small or they can be huge, as this one is.  You can see some people way off in the distance to give you a sense of size.

Then we spent a good part of the day driving down Chain of Craters Road, stopping at every pullout to get out of the car and walk around on the lava and photograph.  The extensive lava flows that we saw were astounding.  Some lava has flowed for miles, from the Mauna Loa volcano, all the way to the sea.  Here two trees have been surrounded by molten lava while standing up, and the trees caught fire on the bottom of the trunk, burning it.  They then fell over onto the now cooled lava and were bleached by the sun.   A spectacular sight to see an occasional white tree on the black landscape of the lava flow.