foto pherret word = hot

this sure was a freakishly hot hike we took. Photo taken 9/19/05.


I discovered today a photo meme website called foto pherret, which gives out a word each week and you're then invited to hunt around your photo collection to match it. The word this week is "hot."

I'll tell you what's hot in this photo (besides my husband. padump-bump). What he's looking at is the start of a trek across a volcano crater. That's right, friends, strangers, and countrymen -- we actually hiked across a collapsed crater with plumes of steam still coming out of it one blazingly hot morning last year. It was so hot that the walk across Kilauea Iki crater felt like a walk across Venus. It was so hot that I did not expect that *not* wearing sunscreen on my brown skin would affect me, but it did. It was so hot that a few days after this hike I had to go to the emergency room because I was so sun poisoned that my skin turned into a mottled mass of swollen lumps and rashes. (Now that made me look hot.)

Iki in Hawaiian means "a little one" or "a little bit." Kilauea Iki thus means "little Kilauea," for it sits not far from the main Kilauea caldera that everyone oohs and aahs about when they get to Volcano National Park in the Big Island. In November 1959, when all the signs were pointing to an imminent major eruption, all these volcanologists and geologists set up equipment by the main Kilauea crater. Then ka-boom! It turned out the show was somewhere else. They looked up to see a previously-ignored section of the park shooting lava more than 1,900 feet into the air. The eruption was so huge that people in the town of Hilo thirty miles away could see it with the naked eye. There are more details of that eruption here, but some of what I've written were told to us by a local Hawaiian ranger.

The best guide-book writers ever showed us how to find this hike, where to descend 450 feet to get from the top of the crater walls to the bottom, and then inch your way across. I still remember that incredulous feeling -- all the while we were enclosed inside a real, still-active volcano, with the open sky gaping above us, we knew while crossing the crater that this was probably one of the most special hikes we will ever take in our lifetime.