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 ;)