Visiting Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park: Lava Viewing & Access

What a closure actually means for your visit

Almost every closure at Hawaiʻi Volcanoes is partial. The park itself is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and has stayed open through eruptions. What closes is specific: a trail with hazardous trees over it, a section of road, a stretch of crater rim where the ground is unstable, a lava tube during construction. The list above is the National Park Service’s own, and each entry names what it affects.

So read a closure as a routing problem rather than a cancellation. The question is whether the thing you were driving up for is behind the barrier, and whether there is another overlook onto the same view. Usually there is. The one thing worth taking literally is the boundary itself: closed areas at a summit caldera are closed because of unstable rim rock, earth cracks you cannot see under vegetation, or gas that pools in low ground, and none of those announce themselves.

Alert level and park access are two different decisions

These get conflated constantly, and they come from two different agencies asking two different questions. The USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory sets the volcano alert level (NORMAL, ADVISORY, WATCH, WARNING) based on what the instruments say about the volcano’s behavior. The National Park Service decides what is open, based on conditions on the ground inside the park boundary.

They move independently, and the combinations that surprise people are the normal ones. Summit overlooks have stayed open through eruptive episodes, because activity confined to the floor of Halemaʻumaʻu is a view from the rim rather than a hazard on it. In the other direction, a trail can be closed for hazardous trees while the volcano is quiet, which has nothing to do with the alert level at all. A raised alert level is not a travel warning, and an open park is not a statement that nothing is happening.

Check both. We show the current alert level on the Kīlauea dashboard, with what each level changes for a visit, and the park’s own alerts at the top of this page.

What to expect at the overlooks

Summit eruption viewing happens from a handful of points along Crater Rim Drive. They differ less in what they show than in how far you walk and how bad the parking is.

Viewing-area map courtesy of the National Park Service.

Two practical notes that catch people out. The summit sits around 4,000 feet, so it runs 12 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the coast and can be rainy and cold in any month. Bring a rain jacket, long pants and closed-toe shoes, and a headlamp if you will still be out after dark. And volcanic gas is a real hazard for anyone with a heart or respiratory condition, as well as for infants, young children and pregnant women. That is a reason to check conditions before you drive up, not a reason to skip the park.

When to go

During an active eruption the crowd concentrates between about 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., when the glow is strongest and everyone arrives at once. The Park Service specifically suggests avoiding that window at Kīlauea Overlook. Before sunrise is the underrated slot: lava still reads well against a dark sky, the lots are empty, and you get the caldera close to quiet.

For everything else, early morning is simply better. Nāhuku (the lava tube) is worth visiting before 9 a.m. or after 4 p.m., and the tube is lit from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., so bring a flashlight outside those hours. From Hilo the drive is about 30 miles and 45 minutes. From Kailua-Kona it is 96 miles and two to two and a half hours, which makes the park a full day rather than an afternoon.

If you are staying for the evening glow, the same clear night is also a stargazing night. Check tonight’s sky before you commit to the drive →

The Kahuku Unit, and why it has its own hours

Kahuku is the part of the park most visitors never learn exists. It is a detached 116,000 acre tract on the flank of Mauna Loa, in the district of Kaʻū near mile marker 70.5 on Highway 11, about an hour from the Kīlauea Visitor Center. For more than 150 years it was Kahuku Ranch, one of the largest cattle operations in Hawaiʻi; it became part of the national park in 2003. It has its own visitor contact station and its own schedule: open Thursday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., closed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. That schedule is the single most common way to waste a drive out here, so check the day before you set out.

The landscape is nothing like the summit. Instead of bare caldera rock you get open pasture, ʻōhiʻa, and old cinder cones. The short climb up Puʻu o Lokuana gives you a panorama over the Kaʻū coastline; the hill was quarried for its intensely red, iron-oxidized cinder, losing nearly 100 feet of its height, and during the Second World War the military cut a secret radar station into it. The Kona Trail crosses the 1887 Mauna Loa flow, which reached the ocean in under a day. Closures at the summit have no bearing on Kahuku, which makes it a genuine fallback rather than a consolation prize.

“No lava right now” is not a reason to skip the park

Kīlauea’s recent activity comes in episodes. The Park Service’s own guidance is blunt about the odds: an episode can last a few hours, and episodes are often separated by pauses lasting several weeks. Statistically, a given set of dates is far more likely to fall in a pause than on a fountain. If yours does, the park is still one of the best half-days on the island, and the pause is often when it is at its most pleasant: no traffic queue, parking available at the overlook you actually wanted.

The park runs from sea level to 13,680 feet and takes in the summits of both Kīlauea and Mauna Loa. It is an International Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the reasons for that are visible on a normal day. Kīlauea Iki Overlook looks down on a crater a mile long whose floor sits about 400 feet below you; in 1959 that floor was a lava lake and the fountains reached 1,900 feet. The Devastation Trail is a one-mile paved round trip across the cinder those fountains dropped, past the cone they built. Nēnē, the endangered Hawaiian goose, are often on the ground here, which is why you stay on the pavement and do not feed them.

Chain of Craters Road runs from the summit down to the coast and is the drive that makes the geology legible. Kealakomo Overlook shows the two lava textures side by side, jagged black ʻaʻā against smooth silver-grey pāhoehoe, over a village buried by the Maunaulu flows of 1969 to 1974, which added roughly 210 acres of new land to the island. At the bottom, Hōlei Sea Arch stands about 90 feet out of a cliff cut into a flow around 550 years old, and it will eventually fall into the sea. Add the Puʻuloa petroglyphs and Nāhuku, and a pause day is full without any lava in it.

Practical basics

• Hours. The main park is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays. The Kahuku Unit is not.
• Entrance fees. $30 per private vehicle, $25 per motorcycle, or $15 per person arriving on foot or by bike. No individual fee for visitors aged 15 and under.
• Information. The Welcome Center is open daily from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. and is the place to get current conditions from a ranger. The Kīlauea Visitor Center is closed for renovation, though its parking area is still in use.
• Weather. Cool and often wet at the summit year-round; hot, dry and windy at the coastal end of Chain of Craters Road. You will want layers for both in the same day.
• Reservations. None are required to enter or to view an eruption. Parking, not permission, is the limiting factor.