Photos 6, page 8
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Mauna Loa Road
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| Another beautiful day in paradise, I had to go for a ride. I decided to take a ride up Mauna Loa Road, a very pretty trip. It goes partway up (about a third of the way) then you have to walk the rest of the way. I'm not ready for that (see sign below)! My brakes felt a little mushy as I was headed over to get gas so I checked the brake fluid. It was really low so I had to go back and get some brake fluid at the local hardware store. A good idea climbing mountains - going up not so much but going down could get interesting! Mauna Loa is 13677 feet tall. The top of the road is about 6700 feet. I'm starting from about 4000 feet around Kilauea. |
| Here's a rare view of Mauna Loa, both because the sky is so clear but also because there are few places where you can see the whole thing. This was taken on the way over to get gas, next to Kilauea Caldera at Steaming Bluff. It doesn't look like much because it's so damned big! They say it's the most massive mountain in the whole world. You can see the fumes from the Halema'uma'u Crater on the left drifting over to cloud the left flank of the mountain. |
| Here's another view from the parking lot at Jaggar Museum. The foreground is distorted because I've stitched 6 pictures together to get this panorama. On the right side of the photo, sort of buildings on it... |
| Holy shit! Those are observatories! Holy shit! Those are observatories! That "hill" is 13,796 feet high... in the Mauna |
| While at Jaggar, we always have to see how Halema'uma'u is doing... |
| One of the reasons I wanted to take a ride up Mauna Loa Road was to follow this side road we'd discovered one day when we were up here before. I'd walked partway up it and I wanted to see where it went |
| This is the end, marked "Stop". I hung out here for awhile, getting my beach towel out of the car and laying in the grass and looking up at the sky through the trees. Silence. No wind and just the occassional bird chirping. Amazing... Do you realize how rare total silence is? Think about it... |
| And then back on Mauna Loa Road again. Pretty ain't it? |
| At the "Top" of the road is the trailhead for the hike the rest of the way to the summit. |
| trail and took the shot above. A nice clear sunny day, but the vog down near the ground made it really hard to see both the Waikupanaha ocean entry and the plume at Halema'uma'u Crater. So I enhanced a couple of the zoomed photos so you can see... |
| Partway down the hill, in the middle of all that greenery you've seen, there's this old lava flow where I've marked "Flow" on the map... |
| Looking uphill. Imagine this when it was molten, a river of hot lava pouring down the hill... |
| You can see the plume from Halema'uma'u Crater in the |
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