The Big Island of Hawai'i is famous for its volcanoes. It actually is not one, but five volcanoes that are joined by overlapping lava flows. They vary in age and activity, and the youngest and most active of them has been the center of attention ever since mankind reached the islands.

Kilauea means spewing, and no volcano on Earth could be as true to this name. Kilauea has been spewing incessantly since 1992, and to this day you can hike up the brank new lava and see the red flow coming down the mountain.

The summit area of Kilauea is currently just a hickup in its much larger sister mountain, Mauna Loa. A dozen or more craters are lined up in an amazing cluster, the most prominent being the Kilauea caldera itself, a gargantuan gaping hole in the ground, with another smaller but deeper hole, Halema'uma'u, considered to be the house of the volcano goddess, Pele.

Slightly to the East of Kilauea is a much smaller, but still very impressive crater known as 'Little Kilauea', or Kilauea Iki. This crater has been dormant for a few decades, but was the location of the most amazing eruption of 1959, when a gigantic fountain of lava shot out of the side of the crater, filling the crater until it had turned into a lava lake. The eruption then stopped and moved to another vent, but the lava was trapped and took a few decades to cool down for real.