Island Paradise Inn Pahoa

... the guide emphasized that many of these were controlled remotely (I know we saw the Keck telescope center back on the northern part of the island nearly at sea level). The tour thankfully gave us arctic parkas which was awesome because it was below freezing at the summit. Zach even grabbed a couple pictures of snow at the top. It was just amazing.

The tour ...

... o, but it was closed due to unstable ground and poisonous volcanic gases. We had investigated doing a shorter trip from the north to Pu`u `O`o. The hike is through land controlled by the state through the DLNR. However, the DLNR has closed the area north of the vent and thus the trail. A very judgmental and mean spirited woman from the DLNR told me so over the phone.

We got to the park just after the visitor center opened. The ...

... Hwy 137 that we had not been on before. The area is a bit more built up and didn't quite have the backwoods feel of where we are staying. The wind was up and so we got to see some nice wave action on the cliffs along the way.

Our guidebook brought us into the tidal pools without any trouble. The tidal pools are a large complex of natural and what looked like man-made pools. Backed right up on to the pools were many houses ...

... it on the slope going down to the sea. We hoped that there was a way to get to it. Alas, we didn't see anything mentioning seeing the lava on the hill. Probably because it was out of the park's boundaries. We bought a few souvenirs, filled up our water bottles (free water), and made our way to the Kilauea Iki trail.

Kilauea Iki (Little Kilauea) is a smaller crater to the east of the main Halema'uma'u crater. The ...

... Kona and Hilo). If you drive the southern route, it can take 4 or more hours. Second, the landscape is varying, but almost always mountainous. There are 5 mountains (Kohala, Hualalai, Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and Kilauea) that form the mountain. To get anywhere you are always going up or down one of these mountains. Third, there are very few (good) roads on the island and the main roads are mostly those that circumnavigate the island. So ...

... Kea and Kohala. It is super dry, which means no clouds, which means lots of sun. Just what a mega resort wants. The landscape was scrub and coarse yellow grass with old lava flows streaking through it. Very inhospitable and desolate. The rainy side of the island is basically a rain forest. There is green everywhere. It rains a lot. Most every day there is rain, but the rain showers do not last all that long. Hilo gets over 200 inches of rain a year. It ...

... the rat.) Anyway, due to the rain I only made a brief excursion yesterday, don to the lava flow which destroyed a section of Highway 130 in the seventies, and out to the nearby Kalapana lava flow (they may in fact be a part of the same flow - I am not sure.) All I will say is the the sight of the flows was exceptionally strange to someone who has only seen images of lava. There is a defined break along the flow, bisecting it along the horizontal ...

... the two Keck domes. The large dome was full of exciting new technologies, including one "shed" that housed the imaging technology used to seek out planets around stars. We will return to the observatory on Monday afternoon to film some additional footage of the telescope movements and some equipment change outs. We departed the Keck facility around 3:30pm and drove the half-mile up the hill to the CFH Telescope that is housed next to the Gemini Observatory, one of ...

... a flash... it seemed to be looking into the tree tops, flittering about, up and down.... i got excited - oh my god its a UFO! - my friends were excited and one guy was a bit freaked out -- what am i seeing? is this a ufo??-- (uh ya it was!!) This went on for a while - about 5 minutes - long time and the strange became real... suddenly the Orb/UFO went down into the treetops it had been dodging overtop of, and disappeared into the trees... WOW! we ...

... type of fish and 1000 colors of coral. The only bad thing was that I forgot the waterproof case for my camera so I couldn't take underwater pictures. Next we went to a natural hot spring pool heated by the volcano. It was right near the ocean so when a big wave came the pool would get cold for a few seconds before the hot water ...