Category Archives: Weather

Planes landing at Kailua-Kona Airport

Plane landing at Kailua-Kona airport

Hawaii has the reputation of being a tropical paradise, but arriving at Kailua-Kona Airport looks anything but. The final approach to the airport comes over the 1801 Huʻehuʻe lava flow from Hualali volcano. This flow is still quite barren with next to no vegetation. For first-time visitors, touching down on actual tarmac can come as something of a relief.

Exiting the plane, it will most likely be hot, but sunny? Not so much, especially if touchdown is after noon. Typically, clouds roll in during the morning and vog (volcanic smog, caused by pollutants from Kilauea Volcano) settles over the area. The appearance, seen in these photos, is sometimes called ‘concrete skies.’ Not a bad description.

Plane landing at Kailua-Kona

View from Pu’u Kalepeamoa on Mauna Kea

View from Sunset Hill on Mauna Kea

One of my favorite places on the Big Island is Mauna Kea. Besides being an imposing volcano, it also has a surreal quality with its mix of smaller volcanic cones and high tech telescopes around the summit.

This view is from Pu’u Kalepeamoa, otherwise known as Sunset Hill. Pu’u Kalepeamoa is lower on the mountain, at about 9,400 feet, a short hike from the visitor center. On this day, those low-hanging clouds ruled out a good sunset, but the light and shadows on the pu’us still made for a worthwhile view.

Posted in response to the WordPress photo challenge, ‘Favorite place’.

A black-crowned night heron snaffles a tilapia

This juvenile black-crowned night heron swooped down and snatched a large tilapia out of a pond in front of a house by the coast. Trouble is, the fish was a bit big and the heron struggled to swallow it. After working on it by the pond, the bird flew to the top of a tree where a strong wind added to its difficulties. It hopped over to a taller tree, which only made things worse, before setting down on the rocky shore nearby.

I saw the bird a few minutes later without the fish, but don’t know whether it finally managed to swallow it or gave up and ejected it. Either way it wasn’t a good day for the fish.

Posted in response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge, ‘Out of This World.’

Telescopes at sunset

Mauna Kea always has an out-of-this-world feel to me with its barren landscape dotted with high-tech telescopes. Then there’s the fact that those telescopes are searching beyond this world for information about the universe.

Here are two of those telescopes, with Maui in the distance.

Posted in response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge, ‘Out of This World.’