Crossing the Kau Desert

Hot, scorched, quake-shaken, bubbling-up, new/dead land: This is the great Kau Desert, layer upon layer of lava flows and fine ash and fallout. Only those eruptions in recent history have been recorded--1790, 1880, 1920, 1926, 1950, 1969, 1971, 1974. As you traverse the desert, you cross the Great Crack and the Southwest Rift Zone, a major fault zone that looks like a giant groove in the earth, before you reach Kilauea Volcano.