(808) 985-6000; $10/car; The Volcano National Park is a must see if you are on the Big Island. You will not see any red lava, but the views are amazing. The Jaggar Museum displays the history of the Hawaiian volcano eruptions and displays the how it works, different types of lava, and much more. There are restrooms available at the museum. The crater rim drive and chain of craters road allows us to see the interaction and flows of the volcanoes. The Thurston Lava Tube is an actual lava tube that visitors can walk through. The walk is not bad. With good shoes and slow pace, you can walk it in 20 minutes. Just be careful because it can be wet and slick. Restrooms are available, but not clean. The Volcano House has a good lunch buffet for a reasonable fee along with an over priced snack bar. It also has an overlook into crater. Clean restrooms are available and they are the cleanest in the park. Kilauea is the most active volcano on Earth. A day or more could be spent in the park. For the more active, there are trails throughout the park. Your car pass is good for a week.

We chose to take a tour from Hilo to the Volcano National Park instead of renting a car. It was a great decision. The tour guide was very knowledgeable and gave us insights we never would have gotten had we done this trip on our own. We visited a lava tube on the way down from the volcano. Fascinating!!!

Visiting Volcano National Park can be an once-in-a-lifetime experience. How often do you get to walk around an ACTIVE volcano? You can find out if and where the lava is flowing from their website or phone line, so it's a good idea to check daily to see which day is best to visit.

The highlight of the trip is driving down Chain of Craters Road. DO NOT MISS THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! As you drive down towards the ocean, you can see where the volcano's lava had gone over the road, where they had to rebuild it. There are signs informing you as to when the lava had passed by, and the views of the ocean are gorgeous. Unless you've been on an active volcano before, it's unlike anything you've ever seen in your life. (In fact, by the end of the excursion, you almost feel as if you've been to another planet!) When you get to the bottom, you can park and walk along the crunchy, hardened lava to get as close to the flowing lava as they will let you. It feels like your walking on glass fragments, because the ground is crunching below you. Be sure to wear closed shoes with good traction and walk carefully -- a fall or skinned knee on this stuff would REALLY hurt! There are rangers to help and inform along the way. If you have binoculars, bring them, as they don't let you get that close to the lava. And don't forget your camera!!! Even if the lava isn't flowing, the trip down Chain of Craters Road is something you will never forget!

The large Kilauea Caldera is next to the visitor center. There’s no lava at THIS crater, but it is of an impressive size, including 400-feet tall cliffs to the floor of the caldera and steaming vents on the floor. My girls enjoyed walking through the Thurston Lava Tube, a cave/tunnel left by a lava flow thousands of years ago.

The highlight of the day was the active lava flow. After driving to the end of Chain of Craters Road, we parked the car and hiked over barren lava flows to an active lava flow. The 4.4-mile, round-trip hike spent 3.5 miles on barren, jagged, and sharp rock- and crevasse-strewn lava. This was a 4-hour round-trip with five- and six-year-old daughters in tow. We needed water, long pants to protect legs from cuts when we fell, and flashlights for the walk back. We did not have the long pants, so we got the cuts. Despite the risk of cuts and twisted ankles, we were well rewarded with red-hot lava. At its fastest, it went about a foot in 30 seconds, allowing us to stand as close as we could tolerate the heat. As night fell on our return, the hill above lit up with ribbons of fire as the lava flows became visible.

There is so much to see in Volcanoes National Park that I have to break it up into several sections. This section deals only with the current, active Kilauea volcano area, down at the end of Chain of Craters road. It is an experience to see and stand on an active volcano, and nothing else compares. Seeing evolution in action and the earth doing its work is both wonderful and a relief.