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.
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