Monday: Day 6

How is it Day #6 already??? Time flies whenever you want it to stop, right?

Today was our volcano day. Until we got here and started reading about it, I had no idea how much volcanoes still play an active role on the Big Island. There are lava beds and black sand beaches (from the lava) everywhere on the island. By their very nature, black sand beaches erode fairly quickly into the ocean, so you can only find them on young islands. As you drive around, you can see where lava has covered the roads and they have been repaved.

The eruption of Kilauea Volcano started in 1983 and is still going strong...enough lava has erupted to fill over 200 million dump trucks and has created 600 acres of new land. That's amazing! We stopped by an inactive volcano first and walked around a little bit and then headed over to Kilauea. We hiked down into one of the inactive craters of Kilauea. It was really neat to see the plant life that is starting to renew the landscape once again. The lava flow itself is hard to get to right now and it got pretty foggy as the afternoon wore on, so we left and headed to the Southernmost part of the United States to watch the sunset.