The guide
Hawaiʻi Volcanoes
Island of Hawaiʻi, USA
Halemaʻumaʻu crater glowing at night — Kīlauea is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth. Check nps.gov for current conditions before you go. (Photo: NPS Photo)
Getting there
Fly into Hilo or Kona on the island of Hawaiʻi (the Big Island), pick up a rental car, and drive to the park — the Kīlauea Visitor Center sits just inside the entrance. The park, established in 1916, holds two of the world's most active volcanoes: Kīlauea and its giant neighbour Mauna Loa. Kīlauea's summit lava lake glowed from 2008 until the great 2018 eruption — which destroyed homes on the lower East Rift Zone and collapsed the summit crater — and the mountain has erupted episodically since. This is a living landscape: check current conditions on nps.gov before you travel.
Famous for
Fire, first of all: craters, calderas, steam vents and lava tubes, in a park that runs from rainforest to raw black lava to the sea. But the animals are the surprise. This is the home of the nēnē, the Hawaiian goose — the rarest goose in the world, once down to a handful of birds, now wandering the crater rims again. The coastline shelters hawksbill and green sea turtles, the rainforests hide honeycreepers, and at dusk you might glimpse the ʻōpeʻapeʻa, the Hawaiian hoary bat — the only land mammal native to the islands.
A nēnē — the Hawaiian goose. The park is one of its strongholds. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Where to stay & eat
- Volcano Village — The little village just outside the park entrance — guesthouses, B&Bs and cafés in the misty rainforest, minutes from the crater.
- Volcano House — The historic lodge on the rim of Kīlauea Caldera — wake up above the steam. Book well ahead.
- Hilo — The nearest town, on the wet east coast — more choice for food and beds, and a good base for exploring the wet east coast of the island.
What to do
Inside Thurston Lava Tube (Nāhuku) — a tunnel left by a river of molten rock. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
- Nāhuku — Thurston Lava Tube — Walk through a real lava tube, a tunnel left behind by a river of molten rock, reached down a trail through dripping tree ferns.
- Devastation Trail — An easy paved mile through the cinder field of Kīlauea Iki's 1959 eruption — a recovering landscape where nēnē often wander the path. Don't feed them.
- Sulphur Banks — A 1.2-mile round-trip stroll from the visitor center past steaming ground, yellow sulphur crystals and the unmistakable smell of rotten eggs.
- Chain of Craters Road — The long descent down Kīlauea's south flank to the sea, past old lava flows and the Puʻu Loa petroglyph field — more than 23,000 carvings reached by a 1.4-mile boardwalk trail.
- The crater rim at dusk — When Kīlauea is active, the summit crater glows after dark. Check with rangers for the best (and safest) viewpoints.
Jess's favourite Devastation Trail, late afternoon
A paved mile where the 1959 cinders are turning back into forest, and the nēnē — the rarest goose in the world — often stroll right across the path. Recovery you can watch happening.
Good to know: Volcanic gases are real — visitors with heart or breathing conditions, pregnant women, infants and young children should skip the Sulphur Banks walk. Never feed the nēnē (cars are the leading cause of adult nēnē deaths in the park). Stay on marked trails and boardwalks — lava is sharp and the ground can be unstable. And one honest note: the famous 90-foot Hōlei Sea Arch at the end of Chain of Craters Road collapsed into the ocean in September 2026, after standing for about 550 years — the coast is always changing here.
Photos: U.S. National Park Service (public domain) and Wikimedia Commons contributors.
Parks change: roads, reservations and opening dates in these guides were checked at the time of writing — always check nps.gov before you go.
Read Jess's journal ↓
Jess's journal
Hawaiʻi Volcanoes: fire mountains and Dad's stories
Summer, nine years ago
Dad used to tell me that in Hawaiʻi the ground is still being born — that you can stand on rock younger than your grandmother and watch the earth add a new layer. I thought that was a bedtime-story exaggeration. Then we drove up from the coast into the clouds, the rainforest closed over the road, and there it was: Kīlauea's summit crater, breathing steam into the sky like something alive. Which, I suppose, it is.
Molten lava glowing inside Halemaʻumaʻu crater at night. (Photo: NPS Photo)
The crater at dusk
We went to the crater rim as the light went. Below us, Halemaʻumaʻu glowed — not flames, exactly, but a deep orange breathing light, pulsing with the lava lake far below the rim. It lit the underside of the steam plume and turned the whole caldera the colour of a lantern. I stood there a long time, thinking how strange and wonderful it is that a zookeeper who spends her days worrying about animals can also be knocked flat by a rock doing something. Dad's stories never mentioned the smell — sulphur and steam and wet earth — or the sound, which is mostly wind until you realise the wind is warm.
Through the lava tube
Nāhuku — Thurston Lava Tube — starts in a dripping rainforest of giant tree ferns and ʻōhiʻa trees, and then the ground simply opens and you walk down into it: a tunnel where a river of lava once flowed, tall enough to walk through standing up. The walls are ropy and twisted where the molten rock froze mid-motion. Honeycreepers flickered through the ferns on the walk back — tiny red and green sparks — and the whole place smelled of wet leaves and warm stone. A tunnel made by fire, wearing a coat of rainforest. I loved that.
The devastated mile
Devastation Trail is a paved mile through the cinder field left by Kīlauea Iki's 1959 eruption — a landscape that was buried in falling cinder and is now slowly, stubbornly coming back to life. And there, picking their way across the black cinders, were the nēnē: the Hawaiian goose, the rarest goose in the world, right there on the path ahead of us, unhurried and unbothered. The rangers say they frequent this area, and they were not exaggerating. We watched a pair graze for ten minutes and I forgot to take a single photograph, which tells you how happy I was.
Puʻu Puaʻi cinder cone in Kīlauea Iki crater, seen from the Devastation Trail side. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Sulphur and the sea
At Sulphur Banks the ground hisses — steam and volcanic gases seeping up through yellow and rust-red mineral crusts, smelling unmistakably of rotten eggs. (We kept that walk short and upwind, as the signs advise.) Then we drove Chain of Craters Road all the way down Kīlauea's south flank to the sea, past old lava flows and the Puʻu Loa petroglyph field, to stand by Hōlei Sea Arch — a 90-foot bridge of lava rock the ocean had spent 550 years carving. The waves boomed through it. Standing there, I thought about how the island builds and the ocean unbuilds, forever, and how lucky I was to see the arch on one of its standing days.
Hōlei Sea Arch in 2018 — it stood at the end of Chain of Craters Road for about 550 years before falling into the sea in September 2026. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Animals spotted: nēnē (Hawaiian geese) on the Devastation Trail, honeycreepers in the rainforest near the lava tube, and green sea turtles resting at the water's edge along the coast road. We watched for hawksbill turtles — the park's coastline is one of their refuges — but they nest at night and kept their secrets. Wild sightings are never guaranteed, and that is exactly as it should be.
Story seed
Pinafor finds a tunnel that smells of warm stone and insists it is a dragon's hallway — until Clarence, sniffing carefully, realises it is where a river of melted rock once ran. They walk it together, very quietly, in case the mountain is only sleeping.
Barnaby's note
"You stood on ground younger than your grandmother, Jess, and you remembered to be grateful for it. That is the whole trick, you know — to look at something as mighty as a volcano and feel wonder instead of smallness. The mountain builds, the ocean unbuilds, the nēnē come back to the cinders. Everything finds its way back. Including, I suspect, one young zookeeper with her dad's stories in her pocket." — Barnaby
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