Walking down into an active volcano was not what we imagined, and not remotely like Dante’s nine circles of hell. The trail was rain-forest lush, the ranger pointing out different ferns and other flora. Only when we got to the bottom of the crater could one sense the magnitude of what had once occurred here.

The crater was a 2¹/₂ miles span of blackness, featuring slight undulations and ominous cracks into its base. In the distance steam vents belched forward clouds of heat. There were no dramatic rivers of molten lava, but it took little imagination and a few stories from the ranger to be able to envision what might have been. We were told of rocks spewed from the ground landing 40 miles away, and molten streams whose only barrier was the cooling Pacific. While most places are losing shoreline, Hawai’i manufactures additional territory every time there is an eruption.

We were directed to a couple of vantage points for viewing the current eruption, but it had cooled considerably and would be less dramatic than what most of us viewed on the news in the previous month.

After our trek down into the cauldron, we drove the road toward the ocean, stopping to see steam vents, lava tubes and numerous additional craters. Everywhere there was a crater, there had once been a spewing column of lava that eventually collapsed into itself giving it the hollowed out shape.

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As we drove down the road toward the ocean we noticed that both sides of the road, as far as you could see, were black with remnants of a flood; a once molten river frozen in time. The trip to the ocean was long enough to further impress upon us the distance and speed that these rivers of heat must have possessed. We tired of the drive; obviously the lava had not. We turned back about halfway down to the water.

What was spooky on the way down the road turned truly devastating as we started upward towards our starting point, because only then did we realized how much higher the lava was than the road, and what a tsunami of lava would have engulfed us. Unfortunately, it was raining so hard that we did not get out to photograph this spectacle. We ran out of daylight, but left determined to return to see the glowing lava that the ranger indicated was still visible.

EPILOGUE

We returned with the whole family the following night. In a drenching rain, we walked out on a road that was once covered by lava in search of the current flow, indicated by an eerie glow in the night.