All Wednesday was set aside for a party of five of us to hike out to the currently active lava flow. Signs and information were really promising the days before the hike, with active lava front reportedly only .4 miles out from the ocean front. Well, read again. The morning update from HVO reached us when we were ready to go at the trail head (not sure what to call it, really, as there is no trail anyway) at the end of Chain of Craters Road, saying that the lava may now be again at or beyond the park boundary (on the Kalapana or the “wrong” side from Chain of Craters, that is) and potentially >1 km from the ocean.

That promised to be a gruelsome hike, especially with the full sun out and no shade. At least the instructions that we were giving to the visitors are right! In fact, the hike proved to be so gruelsome across the lava, up and down and left and right, again, that I had to give up about 1.5 hours into the hike – my feet were just not keeping up. The blisters from my Mauna Loa hike haven’t healed out fully yet, and where the soft new skin is coming out I could immediately feel new blisters forming through the shoes already. This would not have ended well had I pushed it to get there, so at Beacon 4 I called it off and returned on my own.

The other guys were lucky enough to find the active flow here and actually got some pretty nice pictures. Which did not cheer me up. And in addition, that night Episode 3 from the Volcano Live BBC broadcast showed exactly the footage that I had wanted to get, the timelapse of an advancing lava front, which did not cheer me up either, although the footage is really impressive and credit goes to the photographer / filmer who did it.

On the other hand, I had plenty of time getting two other timelapses, including the one from Beacon 2 shown here and one from the end of Chain of Craters Road which I still have to upload.

Let’s hope that the inflation cycles at Kilauea is strong, that lava will be flowing more intensely and that the direction of the flows will be more favorably to hike out there!