On the advice of “Auntie Juanita,” a lovely woman we met at the Hilo Coffee Mill, we hiked the Kilauea Iki trail (starting DOWN the stairs, so we could go UP the switchbacks … vice versa would have sucked a whole bunch). It was somewhere between 5-7 miles, I think, by the time we got un-lost trying to find the parking lot where we’d left the car. An amazing experience to hike across the surface of a (still steaming, but mostly dormant) volcanic crater!
We stopped to see where the road that used to lead to Kalapana had been engulfed by lava on its way to the ocean.
