You can walk up to an actively erupting volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island

Lava’s still flowing on Kīlauea

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park sits on the Big Island, and the ground here is still being built.

Two of the most active volcanoes on Earth, Kīlauea and Mauna Loa, share this park, which runs from the Pacific coast all the way up to 13,680 feet.

Kīlauea has been erupting on and off since December 2024, with lava fountaining inside the summit crater.

You can check USGS livestream cameras before you go and sometimes watch the glow from overlooks along Crater Rim Drive. The park holds UNESCO World Heritage and International Biosphere Reserve status, and it earns both.

Congress made this a national park in 1916

The park started as Hawaiʻi National Park in 1916, one of the first national parks and the first in a U.S. territory.

In Hawaiian tradition, Halemaʻumaʻu crater is the home of Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes, and the land around it is sacred.

The 2018 eruption collapsed Kīlauea’s summit, shut down most of the park for 134 days, and destroyed several buildings.

In 2003, the park nearly doubled when it added the 116,000-acre Kahuku Unit, a former cattle ranch on Mauna Loa’s slopes.

Lava fountains shoot from Halemaʻumaʻu crater

Kīlauea’s current eruption has sent dozens of lava fountaining episodes into the air above Halemaʻumaʻu crater. During active episodes, the glow lights up the sky day and night.

Uēkahuna, the highest point on the caldera rim, gives you the best angle on the action and doubles as a significant Native Hawaiian cultural site.

Volcanic gas called “vog” can drift over the summit, and the park will close areas when air quality drops. Eruptions pause for days at a time, so check the USGS site before you drive up.

Hike across a solidified lava lake at Kīlauea Iki

The Kīlauea Iki Trail drops you 400 feet through rainforest and onto the floor of a crater that held a lava lake.

In 1959, fountains erupted from a half-mile-long fissure here and reached 1,900 feet high, the tallest ever recorded in Hawaiʻi. That lava cooled on top but stays hot enough underground to turn rainwater into steam.

You follow ahu, or rock cairns, across the mile-wide floor while steam rises through cracks around you. The Puʻu Puaʻi cinder cone, “gushing hill,” towers at the crater’s edge.

Walk through a 500-year-old lava tube

Nāhuku, also called Thurston Lava Tube, runs about 600 feet long and formed when a river of lava drained away and left a hollow tunnel behind.

Lorrin Thurston, a newspaper publisher, helped make it famous in the early 1910s, and tourism followed. Souvenir collectors stripped most of the delicate lava stalactites off the ceiling over the decades.

Today amber LED lights line the path, and you reach the entrance through rainforest thick with giant hāpuʻu ferns and ʻōhiʻa lehua trees. When the tube closed from 2018 to 2020, ʻōhiʻa roots grew from ceiling to floor.

Drive 19 miles from summit to sea on one road

Chain of Craters Road drops from about 4,000 feet at the summit through lava fields all the way to the Pacific.

Markers along the route show the years that past flows crossed the pavement, and the road dead-ends where lava buried it for good. No through route exists to the coast road.

You start in rainforest and end up on bare, black lava fields with ocean spray in the air. Multiple craters, overlooks, and trailheads line the drive, so give yourself at least half a day.

See 23,000 ancient carvings at Puʻu Loa

The Puʻu Loa Petroglyph Field holds more than 23,000 rock carvings, the largest collection in Hawaiʻi.

A 1.4-mile round-trip trail over pahoehoe lava leads to a raised boardwalk where you can look down at human figures, canoe sails, geometric shapes, and thousands of small round holes called puka.

Native Hawaiian families placed a piece of a newborn’s umbilical cord, called piko, into each puka with prayers for a long and healthy life. Puʻu Loa means “long hill” but also carries the meaning “hill of long life.”

The Hōlei Sea Arch rises 90 feet above the waves

Near the end of Chain of Craters Road, the Hōlei Sea Arch stands about 90 feet above the Pacific.

Ocean waves carved it from volcanic rock, and the whole thing is only a few hundred years old, like much of the land on this side of the island.

A short walk from the road gets you to a viewpoint where lava cliffs meet open water. Stay behind the barriers.

Coastal cliffs here can give way without warning, and sections of new lava land break off and drop into the sea.

The ʻōhiʻa lehua tree grows straight out of lava

The park protects species found nowhere else on Earth, and the ʻōhiʻa lehua tree leads the way.

It is one of the first plants to take root on fresh lava flows, and its bright red blossoms mark the start of new life on bare rock.

In Hawaiian legend, Pele turned a young man named ʻŌhiʻa into a tree after he refused her love, and his beloved Lehua became the flower on his branches.

The tree survives eruptions by closing its leaf pores to block sulfur dioxide gas.

Park staff manage threats from invasive species and monitor Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death with shoe-cleaning stations at trailheads.

Devastation Trail shows what cinder can do to a forest

Devastation Trail is a paved, accessible path through a landscape that the 1959 Kīlauea Iki eruption buried under cinder and pumice. Skeletal tree trunks still stand in the volcanic debris, stripped bare by the blast.

Over the decades, ʻōhiʻa trees and native plants have pushed back in, and you can watch the recovery happen in real time.

The trail connects to the Puʻu Puaʻi overlook, where you look straight down into Kīlauea Iki crater and the cinder cone that built it.

Kahuku sits 43 miles away with almost no crowds

The Kahuku Unit covers 116,000 acres on Mauna Loa’s southern slopes, about 43 miles from the main park entrance. For over a century, this land ran as a working cattle ranch before it joined the park in 2003.

Five trails wind through grassy meadows, native forest, lava flows from the 1868 eruption, and old ranch relics. The Palm Trail, a 2.6-mile loop, gives you panoramic views of the Kaʻū coastline.

Far fewer people come here than the summit area, so you might have the trail to yourself.

Steam, sulfur, and art along Crater Rim Drive

Crater Rim Drive loops around Kīlauea’s summit caldera and connects the park’s major overlooks and trailheads.

At Kūkamāhuākea, hot steam rises from cracks where groundwater hits volcanic heat, and you can feel the warmth on your face.

Down the road at Haʻakulamanu, a boardwalk takes you past rocks coated in colorful sulfur crystals.

The Volcano Art Center Gallery sits inside the original 1877 Volcano House, the first western-style building on Kīlauea’s rim, and shows work from hundreds of Hawaiʻi-based artists.

Explore Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island

You can reach the park from Hilo in about 45 minutes or from Kailua-Kona in roughly two hours.

The Kīlauea Visitor Center is under renovation through late 2026, so visitor services now run from the Welcome Center at Kīlauea Military Camp on Crater Rim Drive, open daily 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. The park stays open 24 hours a day, year-round.

Bring your own water, rain gear, sun protection, and solid footwear, because there are no gas stations inside. Check the NPS website and USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory for trail closures and air quality before you go.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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