This is where sensible people park, take a few pictures of the lava that crossed the highway on it's way to Kalapana, and leave. The lavascape stretched ahead for 4 miles. Even in the failing light, distant objects dance as the heated air rises over the cooling landscape. For the next half hour, we made our way over a tortuous track that only a caterpillar operator could love. We parked where the road turns mauka toward what's left of the Royal Gardens.
Distances are hard to guess out here, but it looked to be a mile or less.
I took a compass bearing on the steam plume, off to the left where the lava entered the sea. Then we shouldered our packs and set out. We lit flashlights long before we reached the edge of the active flow about a quarter mile mauka of the plume that I had used as a reference point earlier. We elected not to approach the flow closely at this point. It was encroaching upon old lava, heavily overgrown with vegetation, and the night was punctuated frequently by methane explosions, like the mortar shells of an enemy gone mad.