road – A Darker View

End of the Road

A number of roads I once drove have been claimed by volcanoes over the years.

Crater Rim Drive literally collapsed into Kilauea Caldera, the road, viewpoints, trailheads… All gone. Highway 132, Pohoiki road, Kopoho Road, all buried during the 2018 eruption. Sections of Highway 130 near Kalapana, slowly covered by the Puʻu Oʻo eruptions flowing to the sea.

And the Mauna Loa access road, cut by the 2022 Mauna Loa eruption.

How many times did I travel this road? Quite a few… Trips up to set up my own telescope near the NOAA research station. Contracting work at the NOAA station in the wake of the pandemic. A couple trips up just to enjoy the scenery or do a little photography.

Then an eruption, the first eruption of Mauna Loa in near four decades. The lava flows cut the road in two places.

I had not been up to where the lava crossed the road since the eruption. That was until until this last weekend. I finally got up there… No reason, just enjoying the mauna on a pretty Sunday morning. I parked down below and rode the bike the last few miles up to the lava flow.

As expected the road just vanishes under the lava. An impressive pile of aʻa clinkers covers the road twenty feet deep. Three years later I am rather surprised the road has not been re-cut into the observatory.

Here it is, lava across the road, power lines dangling, as far as you can go unless you are willing to abuse yourself crossing 300 yards of jagged aʻa. I sent the drone for a look.

The 2022 lava flow crosses the Mauna Loa access road at 8,800ft

Volcano Road

The glow of the January 2025 eruption above Crater Rim Drive — The glow of the January 2025 eruption lights the path above a closed section of Crater Rim Drive

Dead End Road

A fragment of the old Crater Rim Drive perched on a fallen block in Kilauea Caldera

The Right Vehicle for the Job

This old Land Cruiser had it’s issues… You had to jiggle the gearshift to get the vehicle into reverse. If you rolled the driver’s window up all the way it would roll itself right back down again. The key would only work one side up in the lock despite it looking exactly the same on both sides. It rattled and clattered alarmingly on rough roads. And I loved it.

That old Toyota Land Cruiser was just the right vehicle for the job.

Through the mud and ruts, up the side of a mountain, through thunderstorms and washed out roads, across an entire country… This green beast got me there. With this vehicle I enjoyed experiences that will become memories treasured for a lifetime.

Boda Boda

There are swarms of them, fleets of them… There are boda bodas all over the road.

Boda boda is the most common form of transportation in Uganda and indeed much of eastern Africa. Part taxi, part courier, part light freight service, a boda boda is motorcycle for hire.

Every town has a gangs of boda bodas loitering along the main roads awaiting fares. They are everywhere along the roads, often laden with two or three passengers, or piled high with pineapples, cassava, or concrete. I would say they rule the road, but numbers do not overcome mass. Heavy lorries rule the road, everyone gets out of a lorries’ way including the boda bodas.

To the End of The Road

There is only so much road to explore and we explored much of it.

Yakutat, like so many Alaskan communities is accessed only by sea or by air. Not to say there are no roads, they just do not go anywhere else, much less connect to the road network that crosses the continent.

In the case of Yakutat the furthest you can get from town is about 26 miles as the crow flies taking the road to Dangerous River and Harlequin Lake. This road is a well maintianed gravel road heavily used to access popular fly fishing rivers and hunting areas, as well as by loggers harvesting the local hemlock and sitka spruce.

Dead End Road

Mauna Road

Two missions up into the saddle this week to go comet watching. Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE is rising in the northeast, blocked from view at home by the mauna, need to drive up to where I can see it.

With the comet as an excuse to get out well before dawn I may as well add a few secondary missions to the plan…

Make sure the drone batteries are charged for a few flights to photograph the saddle scenery at sunrise. The lava fields are spectacular at sunrise, one of my favorite places on the island.

The next mission is to photograph pueo along old Saddle Road. I tried two times, both times not a single bird to be seen. Where are the owls?

In any case a couple memorable trips into the dawn.

Looking down the Mauna Loa access road towards Mauna Kea

Crossing the Saddle at Night

Leaving Hilo I turn towards the shortest path home. It is also my favorite path by far. Not for me the twisting turns, small towns, and driving rains of the Hamakua coast road. I turn towards Saddle Road, to the pass between the enormous volcanoes of Hawaii.

Saddle Road seen as it was in 2007, before rebuilding

The road is smooth and fast now. The Saddle of legend and rental car prohibition is mostly gone, only fragments remain. While you can still drive bits of the old Saddle, they are no longer the main road, bypassed by the new highway.

Even before the road was re-built this was my favorite route to cross the island. The traffic is far heavier now, the new road no longer offers the challenges and dangers of the old road. Drivers no longer deterred by those dangers now use the new road to cross the island rather than driving around the northern belt road.

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4WD and Washboard on Mauna Kea

It has long been policy on the Mauna Kea summit road to use four wheel drive while ascending the mountain. One of the reasons given is to slow the formation of washboard, the annoying ripples that inevitably form on gravel roads.

Convoy — A convoy of observatory vehicles heads up the summit access road

On Mauna Kea an oft cited mantra is that the use of four wheel drive when ascending the mountain reduces the formation of washboard. I have always suspected this is a mountain myth with no substance. Where does this belief come from? Is there any real information on this?

The Manuals

There are a great many references that detail the practical details of maintaining gravel roads. Generations of highway engineers have spent a lot of time studying and writing about how to best maintain gravel roads at the least cost.

The US Department of Transportation highway Administration has published a lengthy guide to the problems and solutions of gravel roads. This guide dedicates a dozen pages to the issue of corrugation or washboarding. While multiple factors in the formation and prevention of washboarding are discussed there is no mention of 4WD vehicles being a factor.

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