Looking down at the clouds from the summit (Volcano tours)
Another activity that I enjoyed in my younger days may be outlawed.
A popular Hawaii tourist activity, Maui downhill bicycle tours offer visitors an opportunity to see stunning landscapes on a ride down the winding roads of Haleakala with little physical exertion.
The activity, however, comes with some risk, as bicyclists share the road with vehicles, whose drivers sometimes get impatient, and downhill speeds may cause a rider to lose control.
Throughout its history, accidents have happened. Some have died. Earlier this month, Jeffrey Hins, a 68-year-old visitor from Arizona, was killed while biking down Haleakala as part of a group. The Maui Police Department said Hins crossed the yellow double-solid lane into the oncoming lane and crashed into a vehicle.
A new law addressing the safety of commercial guided and unguided bike tours, Ordinance 5439, just went into effect last year to alleviate concerns about safety and disruption to local traffic.,,“There’s been some in the community who want an outright ban on this type of industry operating on the road,” Mike Molina told KHON-TV. Molina, a former Maui County councilmember, championed the new law...
Haleakala downhill bicycle tours started in 1983. Over the next 20 years, the industry flourished, as it was a way for visitors to see Haleakala National Park at sunrise, then do a fun experiential activity. By 2007, about 90,000 visitors participated in bike tours annually, and revenues were estimated at $11 million...
Last year was the first time in 15 years that a new law was enacted to regulate the industry. Ordinance 5439 limits commercial tours to 10 riders, requires a minimum age of 15 and restricts guided and unguided tours to between Mile Marker 3 and Mile Marker 9.5 on Haleakala Crater Road.
Only a handful of companies continue to operate the downhill bike tours today and have altered their itineraries to accommodate the changes.
Depending on the operator, guided tours begin with a van ride up Haleakala Volcano to 10,000 feet to watch the sunrise inside Haleakala National Park. Then, the van brings the group down to around 6,500 feet, where cyclists launch after a safety briefing. Bicyclists then descend on a winding road of 29 switchbacks, while the van follows behind.
Ordinance 5439 cut some mileage from the tours by prohibiting specific areas of road and excluding the town of Kula. Operators have improvised by adding a second bike loop of the switchbacks, a van ride through Kula or lunch stop in Makawao, before continuing on the bikes to ride down to Haiku or Paia, where the tour ends.
I've done the summit downhill a number of times, the most recent occasion being a corporate retreat in the mid-1990's. We watched the sun rise over the crater, then cruised to Paia without stopping. It was early morning, traffic was light, and this weekend bicyclist used the brakes often. However, it is easy to see how increased auto traffic, combined with unskilled bicycle tourists, made serious accidents inevitable. Like many things in life, I'm glad I got to do the Haleakala ride before it got regulated away.
A possible Yellowstone supervolcano eruption gets all the apocalyptic speculation, but for West Coast residents the more likely dangers lie closer to home. [bold added]
There is a serious volcanic threat in the contiguous U.S., but it isn’t in Wyoming. It lurks hundreds of miles to the west, inside the snow-capped, picture-postcard peaks of Mount Rainier, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood and others. They might look like ordinary mountains, but in fact they are volcanoes—and potentially dangerous ones....
Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, which erupted last year, ranked as the [USGS'] No. 1 “very high threat.” Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano and five Alaskan volcanoes were also in that category. Of the 18 U.S. volcanoes designated as “very high threat,” the other 11 are situated in California, Oregon and Washington. Washington’s Mount Rainier, near Seattle, which has erupted dozens of times in the past 10,000 years, ranked No. 3; California’s Mount Shasta, which last erupted about two centuries ago, ranked No. 5; Oregon’s Mount Hood ranked No. 6. Yellowstone, by contrast, was ranked No. 21, and didn’t make it into the “very high threat” category.
A Tufts paper states that models based on the Mount St. Helens (1980) and Mt. Pinatubo (1991) volcanic events predict that a Mt. Shasta eruption would "destroy" the nearby towns of Dunsmuir, Weed, Mt. Shasta, and McCloud, which have a combined population of under 10,000 people. The nearest city, Redding, has a population of 92,000 and is likely to be placed on high alert.
Mt. Shasta is 300 miles from the SF Peninsula, so Foster City residents don't have to fear the direct effects of an eruption. Now I can go back to the usual worrying about earthquakes and flooding.....say, did you hear that the Yellowstone super-volcano would bury the country in ash?
Blessing the seminarian as he departs for the summer.
On Pentecost Sunday half the congregation remembered to wear red. Less familiar than Christmas and Easter, Pentecost (“Whitsunday”) is the third great feast of Christianity and commemorates the Holy Spirit coming into the world on “tongues of fire, (Acts 2:1-4)” hence the red garb.
Red has been on our minds lately--the red death of yet another school shooting and the red lava against which nothing can stand.
Ancient Christians embraced the notion of an eternal Spirit as a symbol of hope for a life that was nasty, brutish, and short. While our lives are undoubtedly better than in Hobbes' 17th century, there are still many things that we do not control, and physical death, though postponed, still claims us all.
Come down, O Love divine,
seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardor glowing;
O Comforter, draw near,
within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn,
till earthly passions turn
to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
and let thy glorious light
shine ever on my sight,
and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
Former Vice President Al Gore's 2006 best seller, An Inconvenient Truth, popularized the notion that human activities were at least partly responsible for "natural" disasters: [bold added]
Hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires, and other natural disasters have caused these [insurance] losses. Many can be linked to factors that are worsened by global warming. These natural disasters can be economically--as well as personally--devastating. Hurricane Katrina alone caused an estimated $60 billion in insured losses.
A new moral philosophy can therefore be divined: 1) Most natural disasters can be attributed scientifically to human activities (see table below). Disasters are not "natural" but manmade. 2) Disasters can be prevented, or at least mitigated, by changing human behavior.
3) Certain human behaviors lead to natural disasters that lead to death and destruction.
4) Therefore those behaviors should be stopped, and people who resist change are evil.
Below are disasters and their causes, as gleaned from media reports.
Disaster
Cause
Hurricanes/typhoons
Man-made climate change
Earthquakes
Hydraulic fracturing (fracking)
Drought
Man-made climate change
Wildfires
Man-made climate change
Floods
Man-made climate change (see a pattern?)
Really bad flooding
Bad levees and dams
If the new science is true, Kilauea's eruption may be the last true natural disaster.
There's no fracking within thousands of miles of Hawaii, so human activity didn't cause the Big Island's eruption or earthquakes. Greenhouse gases are a by-product, not a cause of the disaster.
People are not in immediate danger from the lava flow, but it has emitted tons of toxic gases that threaten the medium- and long-term health of thousands. For once there are no human villains, and we can get on with helping the victims.
The lava moves slowly but inexorably, destroying everything in its path.
At the Pali lookout in 2016---no pork, not even bacon in our bellies, that morning.
Oahu kids are taught from an early age: don't carry pork over the Pali. If you do, the volcano goddess, Madame Pele, will cause bad things to happen. Although she doesn't appear to have visited Oahu recently, why take chances?
Pele's powers are more ascendant on the Island of Hawaii, where she is spending most of her time these days. Though they are warned, tourists have paid dearly for violating another rule--don't take lava rock off the Big Island!
Each year, hundreds of people mail, fly or hike pieces of lava back to the Big Island, hoping that by returning rocks they snatched, they will break the curse, appease the goddess and end their bad luck.
Lava is shipped back from Germany, Japan and Australia. Some lava thieves return to Hawaii so they can place the lava as close as possible to where they found it.
Skeptics may scoff, but stories abound of people whose fortunes turned around when they returned the lava. One example:
Steve Pariseau believes he can pinpoint the moment his life began falling apart: It was when he picked up a shimmering black lava rock while on vacation with his family in Hawaii.
Once he got home to California, one of his sons began having behavioral problems. His marriage fell apart. His mother died...
Mr. Pariseau said his family’s fortunes improved after they took another vacation to Hawaii and brought the lava rock back, nearly 10 years after they took it.
He got married again. His ex-wife reunited with her high-school sweetheart. His children are now both thriving.
Below is time-lapse photography that captures the power of Pele. What's also impressive is that photographer William Fintz knew where to set up his tripod hours in advance of the lava flow.
Growing up in the Islands, schoolchildren learn the basics about Hawaiian volcanoes, like how they aren't explosive like Vesuvius because Hawaiian lava has low viscosity, and how to distinguish between aa and pahoehoe rocks.
Lava flows are slow-moving, but they are one of the unstoppable forces of nature. Older generations (ahem) worried about Mauna Loa, which destroyed Ho`okena-mauka village in 1950. Recently it has been Kilauea's turn. Lava from Kilauea crater buried much of Kalapana in 1986 and now threatens Pahoa.
