Mauna Ulu and Sulphur Banks Trail

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The first part of our last day in Hawaii was spent in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. We drove a short distance down Chain of Craters Drive. We made a quick stop to overlook the Kilauea Iki Trail and I couldn’t resist photographing a fern with crescent shaped sori (clusters of sporangia that contain spores….the beginning of the next generation of ferns).

Our first hike was toward Mauna Ulu - a lava landscape formed from 1969-1974. Like the other trails where plants are sparse – it is marked by cairns. But these cairns are harder to spot because there are so many piles of rocks in the landscape. We must have missed a cairn fairly early on and wondered around a little before we found it again.

There are lots of glassy rocks on this hike and sometimes the lava makes little cracking sounds when you walk on it.

My daughter picked up several pieces of rocks for me to photograph – a lot of color and texture variety. She probably should have been wearing her gloves since tiny shards of glass come off these rocks. I got one in my thumb when I picked up one.

I took pictures of plants that were colonizing the lava too. This area gets plenty of rainfall but is still a very harsh environment. The plants manage to find enough for their survival in tiny cracks. Sometimes they appear to grow out of solid rock! Every bit of green or red catches your attention in a place like this.

There were some lava trees that look very ‘fresh’ with distinct and sharp edges.

There is a sparse forest that one hikes through as the trail leads upward. The lava is relatively smooth and compacted by all the previous hikers (i.e. no little cracking sounds when you walk on it). It still takes a lot of energy to walk along the undulating path. We turned around before reaching the end of the hike.

The last hike we did in the park was back near the visitor center – the Sulphur Banks Trail. It is an easy hike along a board walk.  There are vents on both sides. The Sulphur shows up as yellow splotches mixed with white (gypsum), milky glaze (opal), and red (hematite).

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