Walking Across A Crater: Photograph by Will Tenney

Walking Across A Crater

After walking through a tropical rain forest along the rim of the Kilauea Iki Crater, we descended steeply down to the crater floor. After the eruption of 1959, as the lava lake cooled and hardened, the molten core subsided causing the surface to crack, bend, twist, and buckle. It has taken nearly six decades for life to begin returning to this once forested area, a sparse few plants having begun to take hold in the nooks and cracks in the otherwise hard stone. We made our way through rough clinkers of ‘a‘ā lava to pass by the now dormant main vent out of which once spurted 2000 foot geysers of molten lava.