Hawaii Vaca, Post 18 - Hawai'i Volcanoes Ntnl Park, Pt. 4

We're about ready to close the chapter on our fantastic volcano adventure!  Frankly, I would have liked to do some additional hiking after a brief rest, but the kids were growling about being tired and hungry.  When they get hungry, nothing else matters... 😜

So after we finished up on the hike across the basin, it was time to start making our way back up the walls of the volcano.  As you can see in the pic, the sun was nice and bright and made being able to see the obstacles of the path a little bit dicey.  Happy to say, we all made it without much injury!

Mama working her way up the hill.  The kid in the red shirt belongs to the family that took our picture at the end of the basin hike (seen in Part 3).

There's Calebber McCheese who, if you'll properly note, is no longer running!  He is tired and hungry.  The joy of the hike is lost on him at this point.

The pictures of the local fauna do not do justice to how beautiful it truly is!

Uh oh, now he's starting to take rests!  We must fuel this boy UP!!!

That's not real encouraging...

You'd hike and hike and hike until you came up to the next corner on the trail.  Work your way around said corner and you're rewarded with a view as such, indicating that you will be hiking and hiking and hiking for a good while yet!  Every corner like this was more and more discouraging to a couple of very hungry little varmints! 

But we made it out eventually and (luckily) found bathrooms not too far from where we exited our hike back into the parking lot that is still quite a good distance from our car.  So what did we decide to do?  Even against the berating of the two hungry critters, we decided that we should do the short hike of the Thurston Lava Tube.  They were NOT happy.

There's a HECKUVA drop on either side of that little walkway entering the tube!  Best as you pay attention!

That's a shot looking straight down which I would hanker a guess at being about 50 - 60 feet as the vegetation is fairly tall too.

That's Caleb (in yellow) and Robby (in the black shorts) entering the mouth of the tube.  There was a unique smell that I simply cannot describe.  It wasn't a bad smell at all, but I would not have described it as pleasant either.  Maybe just wet vegetation (and a hint of sulphur, which is never pleasant on it's own) that I'm not familiar with.

Cool stuff!!!  We missed the Mt. St. Helens lava tubes a few years back so this was extra interesting to me. Lava tubes are a type of lava cave formed when a low-viscosity lava flow develops a continuous and hard crust, which thickens and forms a roof above the still-flowing lava stream. Tubes form in one of two ways: by the crusting over of lava channels, and from pāhoehoe flows where the lava is moving under the surface.

And this is the end of our volcanic adventure.  This is where you come up to ground-level from the tube.

We still had a bit of a hike to get back to our car, but that portion was only around the upper rim of the volcano so not too many ups-and-downs.  From there, we headed back to a restaurant that overlooks the steam vent that we saw in the post about the visitors center.  

Truly an amazing day!!