HILO >> Tourists and locals trickled into the gated MacKenzie State Recreation Area to get a closer look at the cooled aa lava flow during the recent lull in the spectacular lower East Rift Zone eruption.
Ethan Lum, 28, set up shop at the entrance of the park during the Labor Day weekend to offer coconuts to parched visitors, and said about 60 people made the trek Monday over a guard rail toward the lava that blocked Highway 137 along the Puna coastline. Fewer were in the area on Tuesday, he said.
“I would say it’s going to get more crazy, because everybody does want to see Pohoiki, and the tourists, they want to see the lava,” he said. “If you’ve been to Pohoiki a lot, you just gotta get there, you know what I mean?”
County officials removed two Highway 137 checkpoints Friday evening, one at Papaya Farms Road near Waa Waa and another at Opihikao Road on the Kalapana side of the flow, but even with the barriers removed, the area from just beyond MacKenzie park and extending into Kapoho and Leilani Estates remain officially closed to the public, and there’s a 50-yard off-limits boundary around lava from the recent eruption.
But Hawaii County Civil Defense Administrator Talmadge Magno said social media posts show people had hiked across the lava anyway.
Magno said legal access to the area is still limited to residents, and state and county authorities will continue to cite any unauthorized people who are caught within the off-limits area.
Department of Land and Natural Resources conservation officers have cited at least 92 people for venturing into closed areas to get close to the lava. People who are cited face penalties of up to a year in jail and fines of up to $5,000.
A dozen cars were parked along the highway Tuesday afternoon, including vehicles owned by surfers Pono Hirakami and Nick Bridges, both 22, who had just returned from an excursion across the lava to explore some of the reconfigured coastline at Pohoiki.
They said they knew the spot well from years of surfing and swimming there on the weekends. The two hiked over the lava at about 7:30 a.m., and “it was amazing,” Hirakami said. The surf spot known as “First Bay” is now a beach fed by black sand that was generated from the blasts as lava reached the ocean and shattered.
The sand barrier has created three large ponds that are each about 50 feet across, and two of the ponds have fish in them. The pond surrounding the Pohoiki boat ramp is heated by fresh water flowing into it from an underground hot spring, Hirakami said. All of the large fish in the heated pond are dead, he said.
This was Hirikami’s second time returning to Pohoiki since the eruption began on May 3. He also participated in an officially sanctioned cultural event there in July, and the hike in took about 90 minutes, he said. They met one man who paddled in, and six other hikers on the walk.
Bridges has been surfing at Pohoiki since he was 12, and ticked off the killer surf spots that were lost to the eruption — Secrets, Bowls, Shacks, Dead Trees — and then paused.
“But we’ve also got this brand new new beach, it’s just kind of growing and changing,” Bridges said. “We haven’t really seen the end of it yet.”
Magno said he wasn’t sure what to expect after officials removed the barricades on Highway 137 just before the Labor Day weekend.
He said the rough terrain may have limited the number of people who tried to get into the area. “To get to Pohoiki is a 2-mile hike, and the first mile is going to be over that a’a flow without a trail or anything, so not everybody can do that.”
The Kilauea eruption that began May 3 has covered more than 6,000 acres of land in Lower Puna, and destroyed more than 700 homes in Leilani Estates and Kapoho.
Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey reported only “weak” lava activity Tuesday, with none extending outside the walls of the cone of fissure 8 in Leilani Estates, which has been the source of much of the lava.
