Miscellaneous family visit photos (part 2)

Part 2 of the miscellaneous photos series, these will cover more of the geological things we saw and places we visited.

Two days before Mauna Loa awoke from its 38-year slumber, we visited Kīlauea in Volcanoes National Park. While I was there earlier last year, I hadn't actually gone to see the overlook of the (post-2018-eruption) caldera.  It was a pretty spectacular sight, as you could see giant cracks in the ground (visible near center-image below) where huge blocks of material had faulted and collapsed.

Kīlauea caldera. Sorry for the lens flare, the Pixel 7 Pro camera seems a bit prone to it.

The outgassing from around the crater floor that day was also pretty impressive:

Outgassing in Kīlauea caldera.

We also hiked the Kīlauea Iki trail, and I was able to get a nice photo back across the crater floor with hardly any people in it:

Kīlauea Iki crater floor.

I don't have too much to say about these photos since they're generally places I've seen and posted about before. We also visited Akaka Falls (for the first time since I got back), which was as impressive as always:

Akaka Falls.

It's still amazing to think about those fish (the ʻoʻopu) that are born above the falls, plunge down on their way to the ocean, then return and climb up the waterfall (along the rocks with suction cups) to breed. ʻOʻopu are hardcore. (For reference, Akaka Falls is 135 m high, and there are ʻoʻopu found at the top of 300 m high waterfalls elsewhere on the Hāmākua coast.)

Finally, stretching the definition of the post title slightly, here's a drone photo from November 29th, the day my family flew out and I went up to try to see Mauna Loa's eruption. This was taken when I flew out towards the lava, as in my video from last month. I couldn't see the lava very well on my controller screen so I didn't bother taking many photos, but in hindsight this is still a fairly cool photo and I should probably learn it's better to take a bunch of low-quality photos than to miss out on a potentially amazing one.

Lava rivers running down Mauna Loa's flank, November 29, 2022.

There may be one more post in this series with a few more photos, which will at least involve something new that I'd never done before. A hui hou!

Miscellaneous family visit photos (part 1)

While my family was visiting in November we checked out a number of places on the island, from which I have a bunch of photos. I'd just gotten a new phone (the Pixel 7 Pro, for the curious) and was learning the camera, and partly because of that I often only ended up with one or two good shots from a location. Instead of writing a lot of little posts about each individual spot, I thought I'd bundle up photos from multiple places into a few larger posts. (They also won't necessarily be in chronological order.)

For this post, I think I'll focus more on the biological splendors (or things of interest) that we saw. Two interesting places we toured were a coffee farm on the Kona sida and a chocolate farm just north of Hilo (just a few miles from my house). I'd never seen either fruit on the tree before, so it was interesting to see how they grow and hear about the process by which they become the end products we're familiar with.

Coffee berries at Greenwell Farms.

Chocolate pods at the Lavaloha chocolate farm.

The chocolate pods in particular were rather interesting with the way they just grew seemingly at random upon the tree, including up and down the trunk. I'm holding a mature one in that photo, to give you a sense of scale (the coffee berries were more like olive-size). Within the pods are a bunch of seeds surrounded by a fleshy layer, which has an odd but not unpleasant taste. (We got to eat some straight from the tree on the guided tour!)

We also visited Richardson beach and walked along the coast to Leleiwi beach were we came across a pair of sea turtles sunning themselves on the rocks. I think that's only like the third time I've seen turtles in my time here (not spending a great deal of my time at the beach), so it was pretty neat. Especially since the zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro is a lot better than on my old phone, allowing me to get shots like these while staying safely distant from the nonchalant chelonians:

Two tired turtles at Leleiwi beach.

Close-up of one of them checking us out. (We we safely beyond the legal distance, don't worry.)

Anyway, that's all for this (fairly short) post. I'll try to get another up fairly soon summarizing some of the cool geological sights at the places we visited. A hui hou!

A (belated) Christmas (Eve) crater

Last year on Christmas Eve I took a trip up Maunakea to check out something new. Well, “new” in the grand scheme of things; I wanted to see a young pit crater which appeared high on the flanks of Maunakea…back in 2015. I first heard about it the week before, however, and decided to check it out for myself since it's actually fairly substantial, perhaps about 40 m/150 ft across. It's also pretty high up, at around the 10,000 ft/3,000 m level, a bit higher than the Visitor Information Station. It's also in a region not open to hiking, so I had to get a little creative by flying my drone up the mountain side from a place where I could hike.

Anyway, here it is, the newest geological feature on Maunakea that I know of. In case you're wondering, this is not an eruptive crater; it's actually a collapse crater. From what I've heard, this could come about from an old, empty space (left over when magma drained away from past eruptions) slowly migrating upwards via successive ceiling collapse until it reached the surface, almost like a bubble moving upwards through liquid.

I was able to fly directly over and look down, and it's possible to make out the bottom, faintly. From looking at it while flying around I estimate it's maybe a bit deeper than it is wide (though it seems to widen out slightly below ground, possibly). In this photo you can better see that there's a fence around it, so clearly it's been known for a while and I'm late to the event, but I still think it's pretty cool to get to see something like this that's still so relatively new.

As an aside, reaching this by drone was an interesting experience. Drone regulations only allow flying up to 120 m/400 ft above ground level, but since this was up the side of the mountain I actually flew up to 500 m above my position vertically (the maximum permitted elevation of the DJI Mini 3 Pro) while flying up the slope. Luckily, that turned out be just high enough to reach the crater and get these photos, which were taken pretty close to that limit. It would've been cool to get a bit closer, but because I was flying from down on the ground I had to stay pretty high in the air or an intervening puʻu would block my signal (not just theoretically, I started losing signal strength several times during the flight by going too low).

I'll leave you with one more photo I took when I turned my drone around to fly back: the clouds were coming in at just that elevation, which is probably not a sight a lot of drone pilots get to see. Overall it was a fun experience, and a great demonstration of one of the reasons I wanted to get a drone: to better show off the amazing environment of this island by getting photos I otherwise couldn't. And should I hear of any other new (accessible) geologic features forming, I'll try to check them out as well*! A hui hou!

*The recent lava flow from Mauna Loa is still a bit too far away from open roads, unfortunately, I tried for that the day after Christmas. I did see in a news article that they're hoping to re-open the Mauna Loa Access Road in a few months once the lava covering it cools and they can re-build the road to the observatories.