Goddess Pele

I wanted to see Kilauea for most of my life. I'm lucky enough to live somewhere with access to volcanoes, so the concept of "volcano" wasn't new to me. Mountains with names like Lassen and Shasta are familiar places for me; plus, I've been to Yellowstone. I've walked through lava tubes, seen a hillside of obsidian, watched boiling mud pots. But the idea of an erupting volcano was so exciting, especially an eruption that you could get close enough to safely watch. When Kilauea started erupting, she became a "must do" sight.

My brother can see volcanoes - Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams - from his front porch. He narrowly missed being in the Mt. St. Helens blast zone in 1980, and he brought me a jar of flour-fine ash the next time he came to visit. As a scenic and wildlife photographer, though, he too wanted to see Kilauea.

We both finally got to see her in our middle age years, on separate trips. I was not really prepared for how Hawaiian volcanoes differed from the ones I knew. I was used cone shaped mountains, steeply rising and covered in snow. Sometimes, age and eruption would round the summit, but they still had a recognizable look. I'd been on Oahu before, and thought that the Big Island's volcanoes might look like Oahu's mountains.

Instead, by my frame of reference, they barely looked like mountains. Even Mauna Loa, the distance from her summit to the ocean floor making her the largest mountain on Earth, just looked like a long, gradual, unspectacular rise, ending in more of a plateau than a peak.

Kilauea doesn't even look like a separate mountain to me. I can't see any definition between her and the surrounding area. Plus, her caldera is lower than the surrounding area, not on a peak, like I'd expected.

"It's a steaming pit," said a man close to us, on his first visit there. Well, OK, technically, if you have no poetry in your soul.

It was fascinating, but not what I'd expected.

On our first visit, we were staying about three and a half hours away, so we only saw Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in the daylight. We saw the caldera, participated in a ranger led program, walked through Thurston Lava Tube, saw steam vents. I was happy to see someplace I'd wanted to go for so long.

My brother enjoyed his first trip to the park, but he was on a guided excursion from Oahu, so he had even less time there than we did.

None of us got to see live lava flows, the volcano at night, or (on our wish list) lava flows hitting the sea.

When we came back years later on a family trip, with my husband, most of my children and my brother together, we had wish lists of experiences that we missed the first time. Topping my brother's list were 1. a helicopter tour, and 2. seeing the caldera at night. Those things were on our list, as well.

There were seven of us, all arriving at different times. The first day we were all there, we planned to spend all day in the park. We did everything we'd done before and more, including a drive down the length of Chain of Craters Road.

Before sunset, we staked out spots near the Jagger Museum and waited for dark. For the seven of us, we had 5 regular cameras and 6 cell phone cameras. This spot is the closest observation area to the caldera, and the cameras clicked with regularity.

Then it happened - the first glow of orange in the steam.

Can't see it? Don't worry; it got more and more pronounced as darkness fell.

 

It was just gorgeous. Click, click, click!

Then it was dark, and the view went from stunning to magical.

I thought that it couldn't get much better than that.

But we still had our helicopter ride!

Do you see what we're all packing? Of course - cameras. We had wide lenses, telephoto lenses, a GoPro; this would be one well recorded flight.

(That fanny pack kind of thing we're all wearing? That's a parachute. Or, maybe a flotation device. I'm not kidding. They're mandatory.)

We took off from the far side of the island and headed inland, over the "shoulder road" between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, headed for Kilauea. "Are there any active lava flows right now?" my son asked. We're aware that nature doesn't take orders or requests, but we were hoping.

"I'm sure we'll see something exciting. For one thing, the floor of the caldera fell last night," the pilot said. That means that the hard crust on an area had crumbled, and left the flowing lava underneath visible. For the pilot, this was an everyday occurrence, but for mainlanders, it was very exciting.

As we approached the caldera, my husband, shooting with the wide angle lens, was shooting images like this:

When we got closer, my zoom lens allowed me allowed me to shoot straight down into the caldera. The pilot circled over the volcano, one direction and then another.

OH MY GOODNESS! It was amazing.

As we flew on, the pilot said, "I'll just watch for smoke." That was likely, he said, to indicate something that we'd want to see.

A rising wisp of smoke led to this:

The next led to this:

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh! It looked just like something on the National Geographic Channel. "That's new," the pilot said. "It'll be gone in about 15 minutes."

It's hard to estimate from the air, but I think the drip was about ten feet long. I zoomed out to get a bit of perspective, and in again to watch it ooze.

The next sight of rising smoke was larger. An isolated stand of trees was smoking, then catching fire, from the lava at their feet.

"They avoided the last few flows. Poor things, they're goners now," the pilot said.

I felt for the trees, but it was fascinating. Shooting through the moving, curved helicopter windows was difficult, but all of us managed to get numerous shots of this truly once in a lifetime experience.

Mahalo, Goddess Pele, for a look into your home.

All photos, copyright 2015, The Reflection Works Photography