Well I survived the trip! It was pretty rough. I'm glad that I had friends on the trip to balance out the craziness. The main thing that I learned during this trip was that the professors that took us were freakin' hard core!
So here's the gist of day one:
We ended up getting to BYUH at 3am Thursday morning, and getting on our flight at 4:45am. We drove straight to the Volcano National Park when we got there, and got out to hike immediately! No on had any food or water or even the right clothes, because we all thought we were heading to our cabins first to drop off our stuff.......uh...nope! An 8 mile hike first. Like I said....hard core.
Did I mention that there was a giant storm over the Big Island this weekend? That didn't stop us either! Into the storm we went. All of my pictures are pretty grayish and rainy. Like this one. I didn't want to get out of the car, so I took a picture instead.
The first place we hiked was through the Thurston lava tube near Kilauea. It was pretty domestic, and lights installed to light the path, but was still pretty cool. We learned a whoooooolllleeee lot about lava formations and how lava tubes are formed.
We also headed down into the crater of Kilauea Iki, which had its last eruption in 1959.
Everything was so gray and desolate, it looked like we were hiking the trail to Mordor.
You could see the steam coming from the magma underground through various cracks and fissures. It was sooooo warm we just wanted to camp out there next to one.
We saw a lot of sweet lava formations, mainly made from A'a and pahoehoe lava flows.
This is a view of the crater we hiked through from the top. You can see the steam and sulfuric gas rising from Kilauea in the background.
This is Jen and I freezing to death at the top of the Pauahi crater:
This is the geologist that came with us. He taught us alllllll of the geology about the places that we went to. We all had to take notes because there was a test on the last day. I thought this picture was funny because he looks like he's casting a spell. This guy is incredibly hard core. He did all of the intense hikes with us and he is 74 years old!
After Kilauea Iki, we headed up to Kilauea (Still hungry, still in the rain...). It was too rainy to see much, so this is the best shot I got.
We couldn't hike any closer because of the sulfuric gas that was rising out (as you can see in the picture). I'm sure if it were up to our professors we would have gone anyway and took the chance. Thank goodness for the park rangers!
After the long day we stopped at this local place called the Lava Rock Cafe and I had the best Philly cheesestake sandwich of my life. I don't know whether the sandwich was actually good or I was just so hungry and nutrient deprived that anything I ate tasted like heaven. A rock would have probably tasted just as good. Either way I felt a lot better after eating it.
We finally stopped off at our cabins at the end of the day and they actually turned out to be pretty nice! I didn't get any pictures of it--probably because I immediately cocooned myself in all of the warm clothes and blankets I could find and just stayed there until the next morning! My friends and I got to room together, which was a total blast because we just ended up laughing and talking...but that ended up hurting us in the end when we had to get up at 6am to go hike again.
I'll save day two for tomorrow. So much to blog about!
