Day 5 - More Volcanoes and Plants

Again, it is late and I am just now getting to this. I'll come back and fill in the blanks.

Volcanoes National Park - yes.  We went there again.  We got our group picture taken.

Rainforest - better - no Geology!  Talk about your roadside learning.  We went into this forest on the side of the road.  Literally.  Beautiful and untouched rainforest.

Not a whole lot to say except that we literally had to jump a fence to get in.  Matt had the students be quite for a few minutes and listen to the sounds of the rainforest.  It was very nice.

Here is a pictures of the ranch land on the left and the rainforest on the right.  Humans suck!  We need to work on a lot.


Lua Manu-lava flow and lava trees - Pa Hoe Hoe - ropy lava flow is what we see here.  A'a is lava flow that has a lot of air pockets.  Lava trees is where lava came up over the trees and covered the tree not pushing it down.  Some are hollow and some have charcoal inside the lava tube.  Pretty cool succession happening too.

You can see in this lava tree the remains of the tree with the lava around it.  There is a Metrosideros polymorpha growing out of the tree.  Like I said, they grow everywhere!




Jagger Museum - Looking at the Caldera again.  It is still not too interesting, but cool to see...again...maybe.

Star Gazing - Well, this was a bust - not totally, but we did not see a lot of stars.  It was rainy and cloudy, but we got to see a few stars.  The main one that we got to see was Scorpio.  Hawaiian use a different symbol for this constellation.  They know Scorpius as the demigod Maui's Fishhook.  We went up in the dark to the mountain and saw a rare and endemic - only to the Big Island - Silversword - Halaekala.  Apparently, this is a rare plant and a great thing to see and have observed.  We are a month or so away from this on in full bloom.