The Last Volcano

by John Dvorak

  And so it was. The active lava lake had been the magnet that had attracted them to Kilauea. But it was Mauna Loa that presented the real challenge.

  Mauna Loa is the world’s largest active volcano.* Its long arched profile spans almost a third of the horizon as seen from the summit of Kilauea. The slope is remarkably gentle and nearly uniform. There are no ravines. The landscape is subtly mottled, a hint as to the volcano’s character.

  From almost anywhere that one is able to see the volcano, the sides are covered by long dark streaks that reach down for many miles. Each one is a recent lava flow, the blackness of a fresh flow not yet lost to weathering. As one’s gaze moves higher, the streaks seem to narrow and increase in number. If one could get a bird’s-eye view, it quickly becomes clear why: The streaks originate from the crest of a long, broad ridge that runs from northeast to southwest and crosses over the summit. It is from this crest that most eruptions originate.

  The summit of Mauna Loa rises nearly 14,000 feet above sea level. Its base sets on a sea floor that is 15,000 feet deep, which means the total pile of volcanic rock is nearly 30,000 feet—or more than five miles—thick. The part of Mauna Loa that rises above the sea covers more than 2,000 square miles, an area almost the size of the state of Delaware. The submarine part of Mauna Loa covers nearly five times that area. A single eruption can pour out more lava in a few weeks than all the eruptions of Vesuvius since the destruction of Pompeii. If one wants to choose a single word to describe Mauna Loa it would be “immense.” And that is its appeal.

  The first person to record an attempted ascent of Mauna Loa was John Ledyard, a corporal of marines under the leadership of British explorer Captain James Cook. On January 26, 1779, Ledyard set out from the west side of the island with four shipmates and with about twenty Hawaiians as guides and porters. After two days, running low on provisions, Ledyard realized he was less than half the distance to the summit and so he abandoned the attempt.

  Twice, in February 1793 and in January 1794, Archibald Menzies, a surgeon and botanist on an expedition led by Captain George Vancouver, another British explorer, tried to climb Mauna Loa from the west side. He failed both times. He then asked Hawaiians how to climb the volcano. They advised him to make the ascent in stages over several days to prevent altitude sickness and to follow a trail on the southeast side of the mountain. He took their advice, taking nine days to reach an elevation where ice formed at night. The next day he and his party were tramping through snow drifts and reached the summit the next day, February 16, 1794.

  One of the most famous ascents of Mauna Loa was made a half century later by members of the Second United States Exploring Expedition led by United States Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. Initially, Wilkes ignored the advice offered by Hawaiians. Instead, he set out from Hilo, reached the summit of Kilauea two days later and headed across country for the summit of Mauna Loa, guided by a midshipman who held to a straight course by consulting a compass. After two days, the expedition became stranded with no water or food on an open lava field. Wilkes finally sought the aid of Hawaiians who steered him directly west to a trail—the one Menzies had used—known as the Ainapo Trail. After four more days, Wilkes and his party reached the summit where they camped for twenty days, making measurements of barometric pressure and of the magnetic field. They erected tents that they surrounded with low stone walls to reduce the effect of the violent wind that blew constantly. Only during a few hours at midday did the temperature ever rise above freezing. One of Wilkes’ officers who wrote an account of the ordeal remembered suffering terribly from the cold despite wearing a pea jacket, pantaloons, a wool scarf, a Scottish cap and two pairs of woolen stockings and spending most of the time huddled beneath several frocks and flannel blankets.

  It was Friday, September 26, 1919, and Isabel was at home chatting with two guests—Mrs. Montague Cooke of Honolulu and Madame Madalah Masson, a concert pianist visiting from Australia. The three women were sitting beneath an awning on the verandah of the Jaggar house on the cliff edge of Kilauea drinking tea. It was a little before 6 P.M. and, much to their surprise, as Isabel recalled, her husband came “shooting out of the door doubled up like a jack-knife as if he had a sudden pain under his pinny.” He straightened up as soon as he got out from under the awning and looked across the caldera, and then flew back through the house and up the steps that go up the cliff, all without saying a word. The three women looked at each other in amazement. Then Isabel stood and exclaimed: “Mauna Loa!”

  Already a great column of fume, colored a burnt orange, was rising from the top of the mountain. She and the other two women raced up the steps and followed her husband.

  By the time they got to the observatory, two fume clouds were rising high above the distant volcano. In the concrete cellar, the needle of the seismograph was vibrating wildly. The weather was clear that night and the whole sky above Mauna Loa was lit a brilliant apricot glow. By 3 A.M. the glow was gone and the seismic vibrations had stopped. The eruption had ended.

  Nevertheless, the next two days were hectic. Thomas Jaggar had been planning to go again to the summit of Mauna Loa, and so he made preparations, whether the eruption resumed or not. He spent these days calling ranchers on the telephone asking what they saw, hunting up riding and pack animals and searching for guides. Isabel busied herself arranging camping outfits, getting out warm clothes and reinforcing boot soles with patches she cut from worn automobile tires.

  Cooke and Masson were still at the Volcano House. This was Masson’s first trip to the volcano, and so they had secured a room with a window that look toward Mauna Loa. Masson, in fact, was so impressed with what she had already seen that she spent most of the nighttime hours looking out the window. Early on the morning of Monday, September 29, she again saw a glow.

  She woke Mrs. Cooke. The two of them hurried to the Jaggar house. The glow was now brighter than it had been three days earlier.

  The Jaggars dressed and went to the observatory, followed by Masson and Cooke. The needle of the seismograph was again vibrating. Thomas Jaggar took a few photographs of the eruption. Next he headed to the Volcano House to call ranchers and ask what they saw. Meanwhile, Isabel packed a car with saddles, tents, blankets and food, enough to support six men for an entire week. When daylight came, her husband gave her instructions. She was to remain at the observatory and watch the lava lake within Halema’uma’u and record if any changes happened. Then he and Finch and Lancaster left for the summit of Mauna Loa.

  “All day the eye was busy,” Isabel wrote of this day to a friend. But, the next day, after news arrived that a lava flow was coursing down the west side of the volcano and was about to cross a road, she “decided that the observatory’s mechanic’s eye was all right for Halemaumau.” And she left to go and see the flow for herself.

  She rode in a car with three others, including Dr. James Judd and his wife, Louise.† The drive took about three hours. They arrived at the active lava flow late that morning. By then, lava had already crossed the road.

  “It moved so slowly that we stood right at the foot of it,” Isabel recorded, “and watched its movement, pushing and tumbling on the grass, sometimes enough dropping down to leave a flaming, glowing oven.”

  Along the edge of the road the flow was about fifteen feet high and Isabel decided to scale it, noting that “though glowing between the chinks, [the lava flow] was cool enough on the surface to climb its ridge, although care had to be taken to avoid flaming holes that might easily set fire to the clothing.”

  When she reached the top she realized she was standing at the top of a levee of stationary lava, a hundred feet or so wide, and that there was an identical levee on the opposite side of the flow. In between was a broad stream of red-flowing lava, about four hundred feet wide, that was racing down slope, making “the sound of rushing water.” Within the stream, as Isabel continued to observe, were “large bowlder-like masses of glowing matter coming down with the current—sometimes riding smoothly, sometimes
rolling over and over, and sometimes breaking up into fragments.” Whenever the last occur, “red lava spray would fly into the air.” She walked up and down the crest of the levee to get different views, always keeping in motion to lessen the effect of the extreme heat.

  She returned the next day, again with the Judds. By then, the stream of lava had reached the sea, its entrance point marked by “a beautiful snowy white steam cloud going up thousands of feet.”

  She and the Judds followed a rough road down, driving to a place close to where the plume of white steam was rising. They met two young men who Isabel had known as boys at Holualoa School who directed her to a narrow path that ran along a steep rock coastline and that would lead to the plume. Isabel took the path. The Judds stayed behind.

  The distance was not great, but she had to walk in front of a “crackling” hot wall of lava—the crackling sound indicating the lava was still moving, though slowly. The space between the hot wall and cliff edge was only ten or twelve feet. She then stood on a small rock promontory about a hundred feet above the sea and over the point where the steam was rising.

  Here she “could see fragments of red lava falling into the water—rather into the steam, for the surface of the water was really not visible, the vapor so thick.” Occasionally, an explosion threw rocks ten to thirty feet in the air. She would have liked to stay longer, but one of the young men called out that the hot wall of lava was shifting forward and might block her return.

  She did return, and, within minutes, a large block did fall from the side of the wall, “leaving a great red glowing scar, like a furnace door left open.” “I suppose it was well to be a little cautious,” she later admitted.

  She and the Judds drove back up to where the flow was streaming across the road and ascended the levee again, this time, the Judds joining her. “We stayed long enough to get a good view of it all after nightfall,” she wrote to a friend, “though I can assure you there was no darkness in that vicinity. The light from the fiery river and the reflection from the arch of cloud above us where the column of vapor from the boiling sea made it much brighter than any moonlight night.”

  Her husband returned after four days on Mauna Loa. He had reached the eruption site, but, because of a mishap with glass collection tubes, had been unable to collect volcanic gases. He planned to return, but, before he did so, and after getting two days of rest, he decided to travel to the west side of the island with Isabel and see the lava flow that was crossing the road and pouring into the sea.

  “I was terribly disappointed,” Isabel wrote when she saw the flow activity again, “for as we approached there was no wonderful giant mushroom of steam to point out and when we got to the flow not a sign of a lava river could be seen.” To add to the disappointment, her husband teased her, according to her, insisting “that all the wonderful things I had so excitedly told him about on his return from the source rift on the mountain side were imagined!”

  The lava flow had, indeed, changed. The stream of molten lava was now only half as wide as during her previous visits, and the level of lava in the channel was much lower. Dark crusts of solidified lava rafting down the stream covered the flowing lava, and so red lava was difficult to see. And there was no sound.

  Isabel did notice that a natural bridge had formed over a place where the stream was especially narrow. And she watched a man pass over the bridge. She decided to do the same.

  “I, like a child, wanted to cross, too, and started down towards the bridge, much to [Tom’s] disgust, for he had to pick up his tripod and camera and follow me—at least, he thought he had to.”

  She reached one end of the bridge and was starting to cross when the lava flowing in the channel suddenly started to rise. It eventually overflowed the levee. She took to higher ground, watching as the bridge was swamped by a surge of molten lava.

  Back home at Kilauea, Jaggar decided to immediately reascend Mauna Loa and return to the eruption site, hoping to collect gas samples. So on Wednesday, October 8, the ninth day of the eruption, accompanied by James and Louise Judd and Isabel, they left the observatory and drove to a nearby ranch where they were met by two guides with riding and pack animals—and started up the mountain.

  “We had a most interesting ride through the ranch lands,” Isabel wrote, “sometimes through forests of large ohias, then across old lava flows, then through forests of great koa trees with lovely red thimble berries in abundance.” There were cattle, wild goats and signs of wild pigs. By mid-afternoon they reached a water hole surrounded by tall grass and trees. Here they camped the first night, the fume column from the eruption in view, changing from brownish edges by day to rosy at night, the source about seven miles away. Occasionally, the silence of the night was disrupted by the sound of the distant fountains.

  At daybreak, they loaded the animals and “started forth with a little water, some food, two cameras and the precious vacuum tubes.” They rode until close to noon when they came to a steep, high wall of an old lava flow. Here they left the animals with some barley, and started on the hardest part of the journey.

  For miles, they had to step from block to block over loose rough old lava or to stagger about, occasionally crashing up to their knees through the shelly surface of the smooth kind. Nowhere was a trace of soil to be seen. They crossed deep crevasses as much as five feet wide.

  They climbed down and then scaled the high walls of old lava channels. Rain and a dense fog enveloped them. They now had to rely on Jaggar who had made this trek the previous week and who had his compass along. But he was bothered that no sound of fountains could be heard, though he had heard them distinctly from their location the previous week.

  He stuck to his course in spite of the others suggesting different directions. Finally, as evening approached and the rain and fog cleared, there stood the active cone with a fume column rising from it.

  The cone had grown considerably since the previous week. Its base was now more than a thousand feet wide and its top stood more than two hundred feet above the surrounding plain. They soon got within sight of the great ground fountain that pulsed from the center of the cone, each pulse sending out a barrage of molten stuff that hit the inner wall, then rolled down while still red.

  The party, led by Jaggar, began an ascent. They trudged through pumice that became knee deep and excessively hot as they neared the summit. Once on top, they could look down into a horseshoe basin frothing with lava.

  The air was filled with droplets of liquid lava. The sound was likened to giant surf breaking on a beach, only deafening. As Isabel recorded it, at times, there were “great explosions which made you feel that at any moment you might be sent hurtling into space and next morning your friends would find ‘pieces of your mortal frame asticking to the sun.’”

  From their perch high on the cone, they could see that the open end of the basin was a gorge, perhaps forty feet wide, where liquid lava was rushing like a torrent from the sluiceway of a dam. At first, the direction of the current was straight, then, after a few hundred yards, it bent and plunged over a fall into a brightly glowing abyss. And beyond, looking out to the west, in the direction where lava was flowing into the sea fifteen miles away, was a desolate country covered with glowing and flowing lava fields.

  By the time they descended, it was night, and the others ate dinner while Jaggar went in search of gas samples. He found a convenient place near the sluiceway where there was a wide glowing crack a few yards from flowing lava. He had eight tubes. He successfully collected gas in two of them.

  Back at camp, he and the others began to settle down for the night, but were soon disturbed by a slow moving lava flow. “We were sorry to move away,” Isabel wrote of that night, “but we eventually had to do so as the flow that had hurried us down from the side of the big cone and which continued advancing all night, began to spread and spill over its sides toward our nice comfortable bivouac.”

  Another place was found nearby on higher ground. Here they spent the remainder o
f the night. “Some of the party got a few winks at intervals but with no blankets above and hard lava beneath, I think their slumbers must have been very light.”

  Isabel’s boots were still wet inside from the day’s rain, and so, “with cold feet below me and hot roaring lava fountains in front of me and a brilliant moon taking on all sorts of complexions as it passed through the volcanic smoke above me, it was useless to try to sleep. So I just sat and looked. And what wonders I witnessed!”

  It was still hours before the sun rose, and, when it did, “what changes in sky, in clouds, in mountain, and especially in the magnificent pillar of smoke directly opposite the rising sun and with the fire fountains at its foot!”

  She ended by writing, “I cannot think of it without tears welling up. I have never seen anything like it, and I have seen some wonderful sunsets down in the crater at Kilauea.”

  The 1919 eruption of Mauna Loa was a hallmark in the study of Hawaiian volcanoes. The gas samples Jaggar collected—one admirer later lauded him for “using both his knowledge of crater activity and a very real courage”—are the best ever collected for an eruption of that volcano, even to this day. An analysis of the samples by Shepherd and Day at the Carnegie Institution of Washington supported their claim, made a few years earlier, for Kilauea: Volcanic gases consist primarily of water vapor and a significant amount of carbon dioxide.

  Jaggar was also able to document, in detail, a typical Mauna Loa eruption, which began with an outbreak in the summit, lasted several hours and was characterized by fiery fountains, then shifted to a lower elevation where a voluminous outpouring of lava took place. In 1919, it took about a day for molten lava to reach the sea—a forewarning of what was to come.

  In early March 1926 stories started to circulate that people were having encounters with the volcano goddess Pele. “A queer old lady, agile as a nymph” was how one newspaper report described her. And, for some unknown reason, she was spending her time stopping vehicles along highways, hoping for a ride, or walking up to remote houses and asking for food. The reason behind the sudden flurry of sightings, according to some people, was a comment made by Jaggar.