by Matthew Jaffe, senior writer, Sunset

With all of the focus on this year’s Earth Day, my thoughts keep returning to the best place I know of to experience our world as a living planet.

When you visit Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, geology ceases to be a study focused on the remote past and instead takes on a right-this-second immediacy. That’s especially true these days as lava flows are again reaching the ocean to create the newest land on Earth. And last month, the summit of Kilauea experienced its first explosive eruption since 1924.

My wife Becky and I try to get to the Big Island every year and spend at least a couple days up at the volcano. A few years back, we hiked across the jagged lava field at the end of Chain of Craters Road to flows and hotspots near the ocean’s edge. The smell of burning wood from forest fires touched off by lava at higher elevations drifted through the air and steam rose high into the sky as the lava met the surf. Primal stuff.

When we visited last fall, the action had shifted and lava was flowing near the park from the vent at Pu’u ‘O’o. The area was too remote to reach and so we instead hiked some of our favorite trails, including the four-mile loop at Kilauea Iki Crater and a half-day loop trek to Halema’uma’u Crater that started from Devastation Trail. We could have practically driven to the edge of the crater, the dwelling place of the volcano deity Pele. But the six-mile walk across the caldera’s moonscape took on the meditative quality of a pilgrimage.

While much of the park is covered with barren expanses of lava, other areas are cloaked with cloud forests of ‘ohi’a and fern.  Emerging from these lush jungles and onto the blackness of Kilauea Caldera or Kilauea Iki is like traveling from rainforest to desert in an instant. The only greenery in the calderas is the occasional pioneering plant that has found a bit of soil in the rock’s fissures.

We’re looking forward to getting back this year and hope to catch some of the action. While there have been some eruption-related closures of roads and trails (and even a brief shutdown of the park for a couple days) boat trips are now taking visitors to areas where the lava meets the ocean. And there’s no better time to experience this place than when it is most alive.