Chain of Craters

In my tales thus far of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, I've talked about the places you can see on the rather small loop road that runs near the Visitor Center. But you can also set off down a 19-mile winding road called Chain of Craters Road. It takes you down to the coast, with plenty of sights to see along the way.

There was the view at a spot overlooking Mauna Ulu, an almost lunar surface lacking only the pitch black sky.

There was the drive through several labeled lava flows...

...a neat reminder that while most rock you encounter has been there for untold thousands (upon thousands) of years, this rock is about the same age as you.

These same lava flows that felt like a curiosity up close took on an entirely different character when viewed from a distance later on down the hill...

...as you could clearly see the paths where they'd wiped out all life in their unstoppable march to the ocean.

Neither of us was enough of an anthropologist to appreciate the petroglyph field near the end of the road. Touted as the largest of its kind in all the Hawaiian islands, we made the short but scorching one-and-a-half mile hike across open rock to see this area where hundreds of symbols, centuries old, had been carved into the lava rock. I think we'd been expecting to see a large variety of symbols, somehow akin to Egyptian hieroglyphs or what my Hollywood-infected brain conjures when thinking of "cave paintings." Instead, we saw lots of circles and dots.

And actually, the petroglyphs show up better in our pictures than they did to actually see them in person. So unless you have some background in Hawaiian history that renders you better able to appreciate this area, I'll give you the same advice we gave a pair of skeptical tourists who questioned us at the trailhead as we returned to our car: you can skip this bit of the park.

Instead, continue on down to what is (as of this writing) the end of Chain of Craters Road, and view the "sea arch." The road ends along the coast at an impressive rocky cliff, miles long in each direction.

Those intense waves battering the shore have eroded the rocks in an especially picturesque way:

In pictures (including ours here), I think this feature looks larger than it actually is. Still, the spot was beautiful -- even inspiring.

We then turned around and headed back up Chain of Craters Road. But the day still wasn't over... which I'll get into next time.