I do a fair amount of travel for work. Most of the time it consists of flying across the country and sitting in a conference room. Admittedly, we're usually talking about intellectually stimulating topics like planetary science and spacecraft. This meeting certainly had all of those elements, but it also took place on Hawaii's big island at Volcanoes National Park, and we got a chance to do some hiking and see the sights.
I'd tell people I was going to Hawaii for a meeting, and they'd smile. I was excited to go to Hawaii, but not for the reasons that most people are. Most people think of Hawaii as a vacation destination, which it certainly is. However, it is one of the places where rock flows like liquid, and the volcanic activity there is awesome to observe.
We stayed at the Kilauea Military Camp, and that's also where we had our sit-down meeting days. Situated within the park, it gave us an excellent base of operations for our many day trips. With the proper permits, we hiked out as far as we felt safe to the active ocean entry, and watched it throw up spatter. We hiked back inland for an hour or so and came across a skylight opening on to an active lava tube. When I was in Hawaii before, I had see slow-moving breakouts, and pahoehoe forming, but never a tube flow like this. It was impressive, and moving at a good clip. We also came back to the public viewing area of the ocean entry (significantly farther away) at night, and got to see the flows orange glow illuminating the billowing plume and the occasional blossom of hot spatter looked like fireworks on the ground.
We hiked through Thurston lava tube, Kilauea Iki, and a portion of the rift zone. We visited Devil's Throat, and hiked to the summit of Mauna Ulu. We also visited some waterfalls that exposed some gorgeous columnar basalts, and finally drove up to the summit of Mauna Kea where the telescopes are.
I also stayed with my friend Moses, and it was great to hang out with him all week. However, that is true of the HiRISE team in general, when we get together, we all have a good time.
