Volcano Park - Part II

One more view of the huge crater at the top of Kilauea. The thin white smear in the horizon is the pit crater shown in previous posting. This gives you a sense of scale of the size of the crater. It be huge.

On the hike down to Thurston Lava tube I placed the camera on a rock to take a group photo. The hike through the lava tube is fairly pedestrian but if you take a flashlight along you can go though a gate and go back 1000 ft further in pitch black. We did and it was way cool. Notice the huge ferns around us. The scenery is so prehistoric you half expect a dinosaur to pop out of the ferns.

Just one of the surreal barren lava-scapes you pass through on the Chain of Crater drive.  

On the drive down the Chain of Craters Road to see the lava at night we came upon this spot where they had to cut through a lava flow to replace the road. This is a spectacular drive going from the about 4,000 ft down to sea level through a barren lava-scape. The road ends where a lava flow a few years back covered the road on its journey to the sea. At the end of the road we watched at nightfall this hillside glowed orange with molten lava.