We're trekking through the lava fields, this time at night. It's never a good idea to trek through a lava field, especially at night, but it took us hours longer than expected to set up my boundary layer wind experiment (christened "Sticky"), and by the time the 7-m mast was stable and the anemometers were happily whirring away, measuring the wind speed, the purple glow of twilight had settled across the volcano. We would never have attempted to navigate an a'a flow in the dark-- an a'a flow is like a field of razor-sharp glass shards unstably stacked on one another for hundreds of yards. This was an old tumuli field, which formed when a ropey plain of nearly cool lava was injected with fresh lava, inflating the surface and ultimately bursting through at regular junctures to make a stack like an out-of-control tube of toothpaste. This surface was old-- it had plants growing out of it and the surface was brown with oxidation. Any sharp shards that had been there at the beginning had been worn away with time and sulfuric acid. Still, each tumulus was taller than a man, and there were many hundreds between us and the parking lot, an hour's hike away. Instead of heading for the trail, we cut straight from the site of the anemometer mast towards our destination. We couldn't see the parking lot from here. It was just rolling hills covered with towering tumuli, like a desert of frozen sand dunes. We were walking between two enormous fault scarps, where the volcano had strained and buckled against its own skin and torn itself apart. It meant that we couldn't go too far off course. The moon rose overhead, round and full, bathing the terrain with a bright white light. We turned off our flashlights. The summit of the volcano glowed orange on the horizon, billowing smoke and sulfur dioxide. During the day it was a smoke signal, during the night a pillar of fire. The regular water clouds started out billowy at the top but had long, wispy tails like stretched cotton. The winds of the Pacific must be very strong up there tonight.
The stars came out. Despite the full moon they littered the sky, and the Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon. In moments like these it really hit you that you were in the middle of nowhere, all alone on a tiny island surrounded by the vast Pacific Ocean. I skitter-stepped to avoid stepping on something on the ground. I had been stepping on rocks for going on 10 hours, but this one was different. I had recognized the shape in an instant, even in the dark. It was a tiny bomb.

During World War II, they decided that they had to practice bombing basaltic islands as a way to get ready for bombing the Japanese. They had turned this part of the main island of Hawaii into a bombing range, and they littered the volcano with ordnance. Not all of the bombs had exploded on impact, however, and to this day little unexploded bombs lie scattered across the National Park. Most of them are probably duds, but you never know. We had already found three or four and dutifully flagged them and geotagged them so that the park could come and dispose of them safely.

It may be a general rule that the danger that you find is seldom the danger you expect.

We no longer take shortcuts in the dark.

I love your storytelling.
» invisible on 2015-04-25 11:49:02

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