A little more from yesterday’s excellent adventure.
We’d been on the road for about an hour when things started looking promising.
At this point, we declare the trip a success. Never mind that we are still far from our destination.
Eventually, Volcanoes National Park. But first: traffic and parking.
We got a great parking spot – right next to where the Ranger was directing traffic. Made it super easy to get in and out of traffic.
Did I mention it was foggy and raining and cold? It’s always foggy and raining at this overlook. There are steam vents. They increase the fogginess. But, makes it warmer.
We spent a lot of time watching the cloud through our binoculars.
Without binoculars, you really can’t see the structure of the plume. The USGS explains the “stuff” in the air:
Another hazard closer to the vent is fallout of Pele’s hair and other volcanic fragments from lava fountains. Pele’s hair is strands of volcanic glass often produced by lava fountaining activity and can be carried well over 10 miles from the vent. Other hot glassy volcanic fragments including Peleʻs hair, volcanic ash, pumice, scoria, and reticulite can fall on the ground within 1-2 miles of the eruptive vent(s) with the highest concentrations downwind of the vent(s). Pumice and other volcanic fragments have fallen on Highway 11 west of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park depending on wind and eruption conditions.
Our faithful truck was covered in Pele’s hair and little bits of glassy tephra on the trip home — until the rain washed it all off. We didn’t get coated in “volcanic fragments” because the wind was in our favor.
Time to leave. As we walked back to the truck, we saw a woman rushing to the overlook, yelling, “We’re going to miss our plane!”
And all that tephra makes the sunsets better.