The Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park Stamp

Where Hawaiʻi Volcanoes is

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes, for people who count parks

It was the first national park in a United States territory. Hawaii National Park was created on August 1, 1916, forty-three years before statehood, largely through the decade-long lobbying of Honolulu publisher Lorrin Thurston, who promoted the volcano the way other boosters promoted railroads. Mark Twain had already done some of the marketing: he visited Kīlauea in 1866 and wrote that the volcano made Vesuvius look like a soup kettle. In 1961 the Hawaiʻi side became its own park under the present name.

The science arrived before the park did. Thomas Jaggar founded the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on Kīlauea's rim in 1912, making this one of the longest continuously studied volcanoes on Earth. Much of what the world knows about how volcanoes work (how they swell before eruptions, how lava lakes circulate) was learned by people standing at this crater with instruments.

Halemaʻumaʻu is the home of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano deity, and that is not a legend filed under folklore: offerings are still made at the crater rim, and the park is managed as a living sacred landscape. Out in the Kaʻū Desert, human footprints are preserved in hardened volcanic ash from an explosive eruption in 1790 that killed a party of Hawaiians crossing the area, one of the deadliest eruptions in what is now the United States, recorded in both oral history and the ground itself.

Then came 2018. Kīlauea had been erupting almost continuously since 1983: the Puʻu ʻŌʻō eruption, one of the longest of the modern era. In 2018 the plumbing shifted: lava drained to the lower flank and destroyed hundreds of homes outside the park, while the summit, emptied from below, fell in on itself through dozens of discrete collapses. Halemaʻumaʻu grew several times over and deepened by roughly 1,600 feet. Lava has returned to the crater in episodes since, rebuilding a floor the collapse took away.

Mauna Loa looms over all of it. By volume it is the largest active volcano on Earth, on the order of ten thousand cubic miles of rock, and after 38 quiet years it erupted again in 2022. The park runs from the ocean to 13,681 feet at its summit, which means it contains black-sand coastline and alpine stone desert in the same unit.

Official Hawaiʻi Volcanoes park site (nps.gov)

What lives on the volcanoes

Life here starts on bare rock. The ʻōhiʻa lehua, the tree with the red shaving-brush blossoms, is usually the first thing to root on a new lava flow, sometimes within a few years of the rock cooling. Where younger flows wrapped around pockets of older ground, they left kīpuka: islands of mature forest surrounded by barren lava, each one a natural experiment in isolation that biologists treat like a miniature Galápagos.

The native birds live above an invisible line. Introduced mosquitoes carry avian malaria, which Hawaiian honeycreepers never evolved to survive, so the birds persist mainly in forest high and cool enough that mosquitoes struggle, a boundary that climate warming pushes uphill. In the park's high ʻōhiʻa forest you can still hear ʻapapane working the canopy for nectar, a sound most of Hawaii has lost.

The endemic list runs strange and wonderful: the happy-face spider, with a grinning pattern on its abdomen; the Kamehameha butterfly, one of only two butterflies native to Hawaii; and carnivorous-looking crickets and beetles that colonize fresh lava within weeks, eating windblown debris before plants arrive.

On the remote coast, hawksbill sea turtles nest on black-sand beaches reached only by trail, one of the few nesting populations of this critically endangered turtle in the United States, guarded by monitoring crews through the hatch.

The Hawaiʻi Volcanoes designs

Kilauea Caldera and Halemaumau

The summit crater that is the home of Pele and the most studied piece of volcanic ground on Earth, watched continuously since 1912. The 2018 collapse enlarged it several times over and deepened it by roughly 1,600 feet; when lava returns, the night glow lights the clouds above the rim. The stamp for anyone who stood there after dark.

Thurston Lava Tube

Nāhuku, a tunnel left behind when a river of lava roughly five centuries old drained away, leaving a walkable tube in the rainforest. Lorrin Thurston, the publisher who campaigned the park into existence, brought it to attention in 1913 and got the name. Tree ferns and birdsong above, bare volcanic plumbing below: the park's two natures in one short walk.

Chain of Craters Road Lava Fields

The park's great descent: about 19 miles dropping 3,700 feet from the summit region to the sea, past pit craters and across whole hillsides of hardened lava from the eruptions of recent decades. The road has been cut and rebuilt as flows kept burying it, and it now dead-ends where lava crossed it, near the Hōlei Sea Arch. Driving it is a tour through dated layers of brand-new Earth.

How to record your Hawaiʻi Volcanoes visit

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes, asked and answered