My winter break was a treacherous one — it involved hacking through jungles with machetes and spelunking in caves with nothing but the elastic bands from our underwear.
Okay, so that’s a lie. I really took a 14-day cruise to Hawaii and back with my family, but those four days spent on land were some of the most adventurous of my life.
The first stop on our ship’s itinerary was the Big Island. We docked in Hilo at 7 a.m. sharp, and I was awoken to the sound of my father pounding on my cabin door.
After the stressful half-hour of securing our rental Chevy Malibu, the Hawaiian adventure began.
Eventually we made it to the destination I had been dreaming about for days: Volcanoes National Park (in the southeast). The Big Island is home to the largest volcano on Earth. Its name is Mauna Loa and it’s an active volcano. There’s also Kilauea, another active volcano that has been erupting since 1983, whose lava flows deposit into the ocean to contribute to the growth of the island.
So there was my family, standing in the caldera (the giant, huge, gargantuan crater left by an enormous volcanic extravaganza) of a massive volcano, watching it smoke and praying it would show us a little action. It was late morning and the vog wasn’t too thick. Oh, don’t know what vog is? That’s just “volcanic smog,” consisting of cell-killing sulfur dioxide.
No big deal.
The park ranger was very confident in his judgment that the vog levels, at that time of day, were still “non-lethal.” Standing on the edge of just one of the craters that makes up the caldera, I was once again consumed with the power of the Earth. Unfortunately, we were on a tight schedule (the boat was leaving at 4:30 p.m.), so we reluctantly left Kilauea behind.
Our next stop was the Thurston Lava Tube. A lava tube is formed when the top of a lava flow cools, and the underlying magma (which is what lava is called when it’s underground) carves out a nice little tunnel. The magma drains out one end (Kilauea’s lava flows end at the ocean, usually), and you have a lava tube. The tube I walked through was nice five-minute stroll — paved and well-lit — and I was vibrating with giddiness because there used to be lava there. But when you exit the tube, there’s a chain-link fence with a deliciously encouraging sign that reads (approximately) “Beyond this sign is 334 meters of undeveloped lava tube. We invite you to explore, at your own risk.”
We carefully made our way to the end of the twilight zone (the farthest reach that light can penetrate) and soon were enveloped in complete darkness. Boy Scouts we are not, and no flashlights were at hand, so we whipped out our cell phones and used the meager light to at least see the immediate ground we were stepping on.
About halfway in, we ran into another group of tourists (thankfully, they had a few tiny flashlights), who were stopped at a ledge you had to climb down in order to continue. I made the mistake of looking behind us and was overwhelmed by the solid wall of blackness that smacked into me.
Another heart-thumping 15 minutes and multiple large piles of loose rubble later, we made it to the end of the tube. The ceiling sloped down so that the very end was about a foot or two high, and since I was already badass enough to make it to the end, I joined Max in crawling along the rough, cold floor to touch the very back wall of the lava tube.
Even spending a meager half-hour in a cave makes you appreciate the brightness of the sun and the trees and the birds. We made it out completely free of catastrophe, and I can honestly say that is probably the bravest thing I’ve ever done.
… Of course, we hadn’t even made it to the raging river of doom yet.
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