Photos 3, page 28
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New Lava Again
| May 27, 2007 |
| On the previous page, I told you we'd be back to the new lava. Well here we are, only 6 days later! One thing I've learned form hiking the lava is that things change from day to day. I'd already missed some pretty exciting developments over the last year so my strategy has been to just keep going out... White line = hike out, green line = our path there, and red line = hike back. Again, the road you see at the top does not exist, it is covered by lava. This time Cathy volunteered to go out, not having been out since January 15th! |
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| Just for reference, I plotted my path from 6 days ago (magenta line) with my first contact with the hot lava area marked with the red "Hot". This was a little over a mile out. The first contact Cathy and I had was at the location marked "1st Lava" which is only 3/4 of a mile out. |
| Here are some shots of the steam coming from the Pu'u O'o vent and the sun reflecting off the lava. We'd left around 4:30 in the afternoon so we have a westerly sun shining in our faces... |
| And we are blessed with a fair weather rainbow out in the ocean to the south! |
| And here's the other end to our west, where we just came from! |
| In the area marked "1st Lava", my feet started to feel hot. I looked down and saw this, only a foot below me! |
| This is what it looked like from Cathy's perspective: I took pictures, then stuck my stick down there and lit it on fire. Every time I pulled it out of the crack to show Cathy, the wind would blow it out. So all you end up seeing is the blackened end of my stick... |
| After playing around at the "upper" end of the lava flow, we walked down the Volcanoes National Park boundary to the ocean. Looking up the coast, we say this. Cathy said I took off like a hound after a rabbit. It was starting to get dark and I wanted to find a spot close enough to take good pictures while it was still light. |
| I could see that the coast curved in between us and the lava and I was afraid that it would force us to get behind the ocean entry and not be able to see it so well, so I marked a spot with the GPS as "Good Spot" in case we couldn't get a better view than we had here. |
| As it turned out, I found a pretty good spot only about 100 feet away. This is the upper cliff. |
| This is a wide-angle shot of the whole flow from the top of the sea cliff down to the bench you see in the photos above. The stream enters the ocean just off to the left. |
| What's tricky about taking these color temperature (and probably actual temperature though I'm not about to stick my finger in there to find out!). You can see in some of the images that there are areas of the lava that "white out". That's because the color temperature is too high and it overexposes that area of the image. By setting a faster shutter speed, you can decrease that effect but then you risk losing the image in cooler color temperature areas due to under exposure. It's a tricky balance to find just the right setting. |
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