Kīlauea

Kīlauea is the youngest volcano on Hawaiʻi Island to have broken the surface and one of the most persistently active on the planet. It hardly looks like a mountain at all: from a distance it is a gentle swelling on the southeastern flank of the far larger Mauna Loa, and for a long time it was taken to be an offshoot of its neighbour. Chemistry of the lavas later showed that the two have separate magma chambers. The volcano is somewhere between 210,000 and 280,000 years old, yet nine-tenths of its surface is covered by lava laid down within the last thousand years or so, which is why so much of the landscape here looks raw, black and barely cooled.

The heart of the visit is the summit caldera, Kaluapele, a depression about 4 by 3.2 km with walls up to 120 m high, and the pit crater of Halemaʻumaʻu inside it. Halemaʻumaʻu held a lava lake from 2008 to 2018; in 2018 the lake drained and the crater floor collapsed in a series of explosive events while, far down the east rift, fissures in lower Puna destroyed more than 700 homes. The current eruption began inside Halemaʻumaʻu on 23 December 2024 and has behaved in episodes: bursts of fountaining lasting hours, separated by quiet spells, with fountains in 2025 measured at up to around 1,500 ft (about 460 m). Night views of the glow from the caldera rim are the experience people travel for, but activity is intermittent and nobody can promise a show on a given evening.

Around the summit, the Crater Rim Trail (a designated National Recreation Trail) and Crater Rim Drive link viewpoints over the caldera. Uēkahuna, on the rim where the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and the Jaggar Museum stood until earthquake damage in 2018, is now a public viewing area. Nāhuku, the Thurston Lava Tube, is a walk-through lava tube in the rainforest. Chain of Craters Road drops from the summit to the coast past craters from historic eruptions; lava from the 1983–2018 Puʻu ʻŌʻō eruption cut the old road beyond it and in 1990 buried the town of Kalapana and its famous black sand beach.

Scientific study here has a long pedigree. Thomas Jaggar of MIT founded the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on the caldera rim in 1912, the first permanent observatory of its kind in the United States, and the national park that now protects the volcano was created in 1916 and became a World Heritage Site in 1987. Kīlauea has drawn tourists since the 1840s; Volcano House, successor to a line of rim-side hotels, is still the only hotel inside Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. The Hawaiian name is usually translated as "spewing" or "much spreading", which is exactly what the volcano keeps doing.

Getting there

The summit area lies about 40 km southwest of Hilo, and Hilo International Airport (ITO) is about 42 km away by straight line. The park's main entrance is on the Hawaii Belt Road (Highway 11), which runs from Hilo past the summit.