Back again from volcano...

First of all, for those of you who don't know my address... it's
HPA/Cornell
65-1692 Kohala Mountain Road
Kamuela, HI 96743

Soooo, after our plans got changed on friday, we ended up going kayaking in Kealakekua Bay on Saturday. it's a bay on the kona coast of the island that's protected by the state so the snorkelling was beyond words. we had tandem kayaks, so of course that was fun.. tess and i snagged the green one :) ive seriously never seen water so blue. we basically spent the afternoon snorkelling around and exploring, but in usual fashion we have to identify everything we see and write about it in our field notebooks. because the water was so clear, we saw incredible fish. it was almost freaky to be so close to all these creatures. some of the cooler ones were the trumpetfish, black triggerfish (humu humu 'ele 'ele), and yellow tangs. it was awesome just to lay there and pretend like i wasnt there and just watch them. oh yeah, and we happened upon this huuge moray eel that made scary mouth motions at us.
here's a few random pics from earlier...

tess and i

dan climbing a coconut palm

yesterday we headed out to volcano national park again in hopes of seeing some active lava flows...
right now, active flows happen to be about 4 miles away from the end of the road, so it took us about 3 hours to hike over the old flows... buttttt then we happened upon a skylight, which is where you can see down to the lava rivers below. aaaahh soooo coooooooooool! it was one of the most breathtaking things i've ever seen. here in hawaii, pele, goddess of fire and the creator of the isles, is incredibly respected and you can feel why people have such a strong belief in her when you see something like this.

getting near the skylight

WOOOOOOOOOO

andrew getting run over by lava

dusky sunshine on old flows

after that we actually found some surface lava flows and watched it creep over the ground.. and haha roasted marshmallows and made s'mores near it (thanks to our having snuck our marshmallow sticks past the rangers...). it was quite a humbling experience to watch that red hot orange molten rock flow straight out of the earth.
haha, then walking back in the dark for over 3 hours over old flows was fun.. but soo worth it. and quite an awesome 21st bday for suzie!
on a random note, we made a mud wrestling pit in our back yard... i mean um.. we were hard at work 'testing soil texture'...

even though our days are long, i feel like ive learned more in the last 2 weeks than in an entire normal semester. haha i dont even know what day it is because i dont really need to. it's really awesome getting tight with everybody. after living together 24/7 for 2 weeks we already know way too much about each other... ;) we have such a neat mix of people though and everybody meshes really well in weird and interesting ways. its funny the ways we find to entertain ourselves being in such a different setting.. and haha all the dumb camp songs we've gotten stuck in all our heads..
ok that's all for now... peace out and aloha:)

back from a soggy but exciting trip to volcano

so we just got back from hawai'i volcanoes national park. that's about 2 or 3 hours away from waimea so we camped there since monday night. we were basically on the southeastern tip of the island, near kilauea volcano. that's the rainy side of the island so we expected it to be rainy but it was a little bit moreso than usual... we spent tuesday exploring kilauea caldera, which is a big crater where a number of eruptions occurred over the past century. we spent most of the day trekking across the caldera on different transects with our partners , surveying the vegetation so that we could see the differences between what was growing on the newer flows and the older lava flows. it was pretty crazy going across the 1982 flow because you would crack through and sometimes fall a foot all the time because the flow is newer and still has lots of air pockets under it. there's also a huge crater in the caldera called halema'uma'u where there's lots of steam vents and old flows, and it used to have a lava lake til 1924. it seriously looks like what the world must have looked like at the very beginning. pele, the goddess of fire and of volcanoes, lives in the crater and so you find offerings of leis and gin at the edges of the crater. we also were lucky enough to see some nene (hawaiian geese),which are endangered and there only happen to be 400 on the island now. yesterday night, we went to a newer black sand beach that is actually from such a recent flow that the sand is more like odd black pebbles. a few of us crazier ones went swimming in the water which was really cold and haha, we managed to beat ourselves up pretty well on the rocks. as we were swimming in and making our way across the rocky bottom, i also happened to make friends with a sea turtle that i mistook for a rock in the murky wavey water. that made for some excitement ;) we ate some amazing pesto pasta to some ukelele music..played by ben and dan and sung some retardedly funny camp songs to entertain ourselves. after only a week and a half, we know each other way too welll...
last night it pourrrrred like crazy and so our tent got incredibly soaked... all the more interesting.
we were supposed to hike out to the active lava flow, but we decided to postpone it and head home because of some blistery feet and persistent rain.
man it feels good to be under a roof again at the moment :)

just a random thought... early monday morning we're heading down to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park for the week so I'll probably be out of contact til the end of the week.

the first week on the big island!

so after two years of talking about this, i finally got to hawai'i on saturday for the start of an entire semester on the island. after some crazy city driving at 4am and a few wrong turns into jersey, both me and my luggage made it out of la guardia. luckily, i got to travel with sarah and it was pretty sweet because we got to fly out of denver and soar over the rockies.

landing in kona, alex (a cornell prof and our program director) greeted us with gorgeous fresh leis and we drove up to our house in waimea on the north part of the island. the house is a huge ranch that currently has 12 of us undergrads, alex and another prof lou, their two young kids claire and ellie, and the program assistant and ses major graduate named ty.
i'm in the only quad room which happens to be quite awesome with a huuuuge window overlooking the stream behind our house. it's really great because most of the 12 of us are already pretty tight since we're almost all junior ses majors, and living together 24/7 makes us like one big happy ohana (family).
we started out the first day with a nice long orientation and then headed out to hupuna beach state park down towards kona. there we played in the surf and had a bbq on the beach.
on our first real day, we were up at 6:30 am for breakfast at the HPA (hawai'i prep academy) dining hall whose campus we're actually living on. from there we headed to look at some vegetation on a small cinder cone, then drove to some gorgeous falls near hilo called rainbow falls.

by now we were on the rainy side of the island, meaning we had basically gone from the northwest of the island to the east. from there we stopped at kaumana caves, which is actually a huge lava tube and explored, trying not to hit our heads on too many chunks of lava in the dark. to end the day, we headed up to the observatory on mauna kea, a 14000 ft volcano. the observatory was actually only at 9000 ft but was plenty spectacular. we hiked up onto one of the hills to watch the sunset, since we were above all the clouds in the sky. after sunset, we saw the most stars in the sky i've ever seen. needless to say, we were ready for bed when we got home.
for the rest of the week, we got to snorkel at one of the resorts, mauna lani, and explored the lava there. we also hiked up another of hawai'i's volcanoes called hualalai to look at some unique chunks of lava from certain flows. instead of the usual black basalt rocks, there had been huge chunks of a green mineral called olivine that came up in that eruption, making rocks that were black on the outside and beautiful green crystals on the outside.

we also mapped a road on the top of the big island's oldest volcano, kohala, which is actually right behind our house. yesterday we checked out some soil profiles and other lava flows, then drove down to polulu valley on the very north of the island and hiked down to the black sand beach there and got completely soaked in our clothes playing in the rough waves.

today ended the week absolutely amazingly because we started the morning by seeing a bunch of plants present in hawai'i pre-european introductions at an ethnobotanical garden. we then went to a historical park were we saw some awesome religious carvings and then went snorkeling in the bay. while the fish were absolutely stunning, they were outdone by a pack of spinner dolphins that happened to be sleeping in the bay. when the pack came up for air, they were literally ten feet away from me at some points. it was the most incredible experience to just swim around and watch the dolphins gracefully move through the water and shoot up into the air for a breath. after that, we finished the day with a sunset picnic on some lava flows on the shore. an unbelievable end to an unbelievable week.
i honestly cannot believe that we did this much in one week. it's pretty tiring to be up so early and be constantly out and doing things, to go from a hike to a snorkel to another hike and then finallly come home for dinner late, and all at the same time be 'having class.' while we literally are in class all waking hours, it doesnt feel like it. after this, im never gonna want to go back to having lecture inside, or labs indoors. also, this island is basically the absolute perfect place to study the earth. in an hour's drive, you can go from beach, to barren lands covered in lava, to ranch drylands, to mountains and cold forests, to sub alpine, to rainforest. WOWZAAAA. oh, and two more random thoughts. i saw a chameleon today climbing around the grass at the botanical garden, and we've seen two absolutely full half-circle rainbows. how bout that :)
so i'm sorry for blabbing on and on about this all, but i know some of you will want all the details. and i just felt the need to convey the utterly amazing insanity that this week has been. im sure i'll get lazy and start putting up mostly pictures.. and of course they're more fun to look at anyways.
i love you all but beware, i might not come back ;)