Hawaii Volcanoes National Park
National Park #15
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is on the Island of Hawaii. The park is incredibly busy when Kilauea is active. We arrived early and made Kilauea our first stop.
The best place to see the eruption during our visit was from a special viewing spot off Crater Rim Drive. We arrived pretty early; parking was ample and we only had to share the view with a handful of people. After walking about a mile down the road, we came to the viewing area.
It’s a bit hard to see from the picture but if you look closely you can see red hot lava. A nice family let us borrow their binoculars to get a closer look of the flowing lava. It was so cool!
After we got our fill of hot lava, we trekked back to the car and we made a stop at the Thurston Lava Tube. A lava tube is basically a cave created when molten lava stops flowing. We spent less about 20 minutes at Thurston Lava Tube but I highly recommend checking it out; just bring a flashlight because it’s very dark in the tube.
Up next, a stop at the visitor’s center. Although the visitor’s center wasn’t open, we were able to talk to a ranger and pickup Junior Ranger Books for the kids. While listening to the ranger talk about some of the highlights of the park, we learned that the eruption viewing areas get extremely busy in the afternoon. We were thankful for our early start and decided to stay away from the 2 to 3 hour traffic jams on that side of the park.
So we decided to hike the Sulphur Banks Trail next. This short easy trail was awesome. It was interesting to learn about the steam and (stinky) gases being vented in this thermal area.
After a picnic lunch, we decided to check out a different view of Kilauea. The Kilauea Overlook offers fantastic views of the caldera. But due to the structure of the caldera, the view of the active eruption could not be seen from this side.
Since it was after noon and New Year’s Eve the park was starting to get very busy we said aloha to the park.
Visiting three islands on our trip to Hawaii was a quite ambitious but we were so glad we were able to experience both Hawaii Volcanoes and Haleakala National Parks! And you can’t beat getting to enjoy an active volcano eruption!