Lava viewing on Mauna Loa

It's been an exciting week as Mauna Loa continues to erupt here on Hawaiʻi island for the first time in 38 years. On Monday night last week (the first full day of the eruption) it was clear enough that from Hilo we could see a red glow in the sky off to the west. It wasn't the easiest to capture on camera, but here's a passable photo of it:

Glow of lava off to the west, as seen from Hilo.

My family left for home the next morning, and since I had the rest of the day off I took the opportunity to head up Saddle Road to see if I could see the lava. To make a long story short, the answer was yes, after an hour waiting around for clouds to lift. Which they did, thankfully, a little before sunset, allowing a good view of the rivers of molten rock coursing down Mauna Loa's sides from Puʻu Huluhulu.

Lava seen through trees on Puʻu Huluhulu (and clouds).

Here you can see a lava fountain in silhouette high up on the rift zone and the lava as it snaked its way down the volcano. This is as good a time as any to mention that I got a new phone last month, the Pixel 7 Pro, and I'm finding myself rather impressed with its camera. While its maximum 30× zoom isn't anything I'd want to share, I find it can still get good results like this into the teens× zoom range, and certainly much better than my previous (almost 5-year-old) phone (which got pretty bad beyond maybe ~2–3×). Anyway, here's one last wide photo to get a better sense of the scale:

View south from Puʻu Huluhulu toward lava coming down Mauna Loa.

The lava was still pretty far away at that point (I think about 18 km), so even though I tried sending my drone out towards it I couldn't get close enough for the view to appreciably change. The news since then has been all about how the front of the flow is approaching Saddle Road, though it's been getting slower over time as the lava reaches flatter areas, and even if it continues at it's current pace unabated (which is unlikely) it'll be over a week before it reaches the road. It'd be pretty major if it did, as Saddle Road is the shortest route between the east and west sides of the island and thus a major thoroughfare, and no matter which side of the Maunakea access road it hypothetically covers it'd create a major headache for some of the observatories up there. It's currently coming pretty much straight down the line dividing east from west, so at some point it'll have to split to one side or the other, and then we'll probably have a better idea of where (and if) it'll cross the road. (If it heads west, the road rises higher on Maunakea's slopes and will probably be fine; east is a bit more iffy, considering the road currently sits on lava flows from mid-last-century.)

I haven't been up since Tuesday since the weather has, unfortunately, been rather poor, often with thick clouds over the Saddle region meaning I wouldn't see much of anything even if I did go up. (It got lost among all the volcano coverage, but we actually got snow on Maunakea's summit the same night the eruption started.) I'm definitely keeping an eye on things, though, and if the weather clears up enough to make viewing reasonable I'll probably be heading up the mountain again, camera(s?) in tow. Anyway, to summarize, no one's in danger at this point (historical evidence suggests that the eruption will remain confined to the northeast rift zone and not threaten people on the west and south), and any potential danger to infrastructure is also likely not imminent (and even then, it's ultimately just a road, rather than a residential neighborhood or something). It has been (and will continue to be) very interesting to watch this develop, though! A hui hou!