GOING WITH THE FLOW ISLAND-IN-THE-MAKING AT HAWAII VOLCANOES PARK.

Byline: Eric Noland Travel Editor

HAWAII VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK - The river was up, and as it tumbled down the mountainside, it occasionally breached its banks, branching into streams that detoured here and there before rejoining the main channel. Like rivers everywhere, it cascaded inevitably toward the sea.

But this one was much different than most seen in America's national parks. Its contents were bright orange-red, and considerably warmer than the norm - 2,100 degrees. This was a river of lava, the Earth's innards percolating through a cliffside vent a few weeks ago on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Dozens of tourists stood transfixed as they viewed it from 3 1/2 miles away. With the naked eye, it resembled a Southern California brush fire, but through binoculars or one of the telescopes set on a tripod by a park ranger, it had all the traits of a free-flowing mountain stream.

``Smell that?'' said ranger Michael Steele. ``The wood smoke? That's the forest burning.''

We're moths to a flame, we 21st-century tourists. We venture to a corner of an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where an active volcano is spilling its guts, and we want to see the lava flowing. Defying every instinct of self-preservation, we walk toward it, rather than away from it.

It's an understandable fascination. These are the same forces that began forming these islands some 80 million years ago, and here they are, still at work, still oozing out new island every day.

Since 1983, when Kilauea Volcano erupted violently from the Puu Oo vent on the mountain's southeast flank, lava has poured down the mountain to the coast, there colliding with seawater, cooling and causing Hawaii to be the only state in the union that increases in area. In the intervening 19 years, this island has grown by 700 acres - the equivalent of 10 Disneylands.

That's probably why the majority of visitors head into the Kilauea Visitor Center at the park entrance and immediately ask where they can see lava flowing.

Oh, it's interesting to look into a 1959 volcanic crater that is still emitting puffs of sulfur, walk down the heart of a lava tube that dates to the writing of the Constitution, or hike along the edge of a now-quiet caldera that inspired some of Mark Twain's finest travel writing. But the current activity of Kilauea - and the chronically cranky Hawaiian goddess Pele - is the main event at this national park.

Visitors should first be advised to curb their expectations upon arrival. Discovery Channel documentaries and even Visitor Center video updates on the volcano feature highlight reels of past pyrotechnic activity - great fountains of red magma spurting into the air, or gushing like a flood down the mountain.

These sights are rare, occurring only in times of particularly violent eruptions. More likely, especially on a daytime visit, you'll see no more than a gray veil of smoke and steam rising from a flow that is several miles distant, or a modest red glow off the cloud cover.

We got lucky, treated to what ranger Charlie Ricketts described as ``one of the most spectacular surface flows we've had in a while.'' Just after sunset is a good time to observe it, since the fiery flow is more evident against a dark sky. The park road is open 24 hours, but the rangers are at the end of the road for only a short time after dark, providing information and glimpses through their telescopes.

As we watched, a bright blaze suddenly appeared at the top of the ridge. ``A breakout,'' Ricketts said excitedly. The lava had just punched through the ground, torching forest as it began to spill toward the river that flowed far down the slope.

The crawl of that lava is relentless, and awesome in its power. Just a few feet from where we stood was the terminus of a tourist road. It didn't used to stop here. It was a scenic loop through the national park, called the Chain of Craters Road, but a flow from the Puu Oo vent engulfed it. The most recent flow at the end of the road occurred in 1995.

The landscape now is all swirls, ridges, lumps and cracks - resembling thick chocolate cake batter spilled out of a mixing bowl and left on the counter for someone else to clean up.

The road wasn't the only casualty. Also inundated by the lava were 181 homes, a church, a community center, a park visitor center, a campground, power lines, 16,000 acres of rain forest and numerous sites of Hawaiian antiquity.

The black sea has long since cooled to solid rock, with green ferns poking up here and there in the depths of a fissure - as the native flora begins the relentless process of reclaiming it. A pathway to an overlook a short distance away is marked out, but the rangers don't recommend visitors proceeding farther.

``How long does it take to get out there and back?'' a tourist asked Ricketts in the gathering darkness. ``Ask her,'' he said. A woman ranger, with pack, sturdy boots, long pants and walking stick, was just coming down off the black plain. She was keenly familiar with the route, and it had taken her five hours to make the seven-mile round trip.

Time is generally budgeted insufficiently by all visitors to this park. The popular resorts of Kona and the Kohala Coast, on the west side of the island, are at least a two-hour drive away, but many insist on trying to squeeze the volcano into a day trip.

That leaves time for little more than a drive through the park, with few stops and only the shortest of walks. If you can only spare enough time for such a cursory visit, be sure to drive Chain of Craters Road to where it disappears into the lava field. The active flow is straight ahead along the mountain slope, but bear in mind that in the daytime you might see nothing more than the gray haze it is emitting.

Another easy loop is Crater Rim Drive, an 11-mile skirting of Kilauea's summit crater.

The first stop is Kilauea Iki Crater, which erupted nearly a half-century ago. Look closely and you can see a dark bathtub ring of crumbly lava from the receding effect.

Don't miss the Thurston Lava Tube, where, in the late 1700s, surface lava cooled and hardened and the molten flow continued beneath it, creating a tunnel. It's big enough to drive a golf cart through, and a string of lights helps you find your way. Water drips eerily from the ceiling - this once was a freshwater source for the Hawaiian people.

At another stop, the Devastation Trail leads through a pumice field that looks like the surface of some distant planet.

The road also meanders past an overlook of Halemaumau, a steeply sided crater that spews volcanic gases from hundreds of outlets. This pit featured a lake of lava on its floor as recently as the 1920s (before gradually seeping away through a rift). Twain was certainly impressed with its spectacle when he perched on the rim in 1866.

The lava fountains, he wrote, ``boiled, and coughed, and sputtered, and discharged sprays of stringy red fire - of about the consistency of mush, for instance - from 10 to 15 feet in the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks - a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snowflakes!''

A little farther along Crater Rim Drive are steam vents, where rainwater accumulates underground and is heated by the hot rock. It escapes as steam with only the faintest scent of sulfur, and you can stride squarely into the cloud - achieving a kind of open-air sauna.

Before undertaking either of these drives, it's a good idea to pick up the ``Road Guide to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park,'' which sells in the Visitor Center for $5.95. I'm not normally a fan of park drive guides, but this one is exceptional, providing odometer readings to various sites and a wealth of information about the geologic forces, history, plant life and anthropology of the region.

If you allow a little more time for your visit, you might want to get out on foot in one of the otherworldly landscapes of the park. The Kau Desert, perhaps. Or the area of Alanui Kahiko, where the two major types of lava - the smooth and shiny pahoehoe and the crumbly aa - appear as frozen cascades on the side of a steep pali. Keep an eye out for a former park service road in this region - passage through the park has been continually rerouted with each successive episode of volcanic activity.

On a previous visit, we hiked the Mauna Ulu Trail out to the Puu Huluhulu cinder cone, but rainstorms foiled a repeat visit this time.

At one point, we rode out a shower beneath a tourist shelter at the Keala Komo overlook, on the Chain of Craters Road. Perhaps no other spot in the park provides a better impression of nature's upheaval in this corner of Hawaii.

It is atop a pali, looking out over the Pacific. When Europeans arrived in the islands in the late 1700s, they found thriving villages on the coastal plain below. But a succession of eruptions, and an earthquake in 1868, rearranged the landscape and foiled all designs of habitation.

It's been no different in recent years. In 1975, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake caused some coastal escarpments to slip. The coastline sank 10 feet and was pushed 20 feet out to sea. This set off a tsunami that crashed onto a beach some distance away and killed two campers.

Hawaii, born of furious geologic activity, was rearranging its face once again.

Still is. And you can see it.

CAPTION(S):

7 photos, map

Photo:

(1 -- 3 -- color) Visitors to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park have a chance to see streams of surface lava, top. Other incredible sights include ferns popping through fissures in the rock-hard plain, above left, and park roads stopped in their tracks by recent flows, left.

(4 -- 6) The Kilauea Iki Crater, left, which erupted in 1959, is a stop along the Crater Rim Drive at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Steam vents, above, caused by molten rocks that heat rainwater, blast a visitor. A pumice field, above, reminds some tourists of the surface of a distant planet, hence its name: ``Devastation Trail.''

(7) Fields of pahoehoe lava resemble a pan of just-baked brownies. The lava field is just off Chain of Craters Road below Holei Pali, which is visible in the distance.

Eric Noland/Travel Editor

Map:

(color) HAWAII VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK

U.S. Geological Survey