34 W. T, Brigham — Summit Crater of Mt. Loa in 1880. 



lava I have seldom seen and never before ridden over. Beds 

 of aa were succeeded by piles of jagged scoria in fragments 

 from one to twenty cubic feet in bulk, and over these my mule 

 jumped like a chamois. At last we came upon a level plain 

 from which had poured the lava that had hindered our ascent. 

 Although we were on the summit, the crater, Mokuaweoweo, 

 did not at first appear, but on every side were rough piles of 

 lava, some recent, and abundant deposits of the vesicular lava 

 called limu. This limn is of a pale green color presenting the 

 appearance of vegetation. Some fragments of it were a foot 

 in diameter, the exterior glazed and of a much darker green, 

 the whole very vesicular and so full of air as to float on water. 

 In appearance it was frozen froth. In the midst of this waste 

 plain we found the crater. Since I saw it fifteen years before 

 great changes had occurred. Then no change but the gradual 

 decay of time seemed imminent ; all was the repose of the 

 dead. There were some concentric cracks in the outer walls, 

 but the lava between these cracks and the crater itself was so 

 solid as to retain snow and ice all the summer, and the descent 

 into the crater could be made only where the smaller craters 

 broke into the outer wall. On both the east and west sides the 

 precipices of gray, scarred and compact lava rose to the height 

 of nearly a thousand feet, and seemed coeval with the moun- 

 tain. At the present time, these ancient walls were cracked 

 and tottering to their fall ; in some places they much resembled 

 a wall of loose stones artificially laid. It was dangerous to 

 approach the brink of Pohaku Hanalei so loose were the lava 

 blocks, and the vibrations caused by my approach seemed to 

 extend downward several hundred feet toward the talus which 

 had been the result of a tremor more severe than usual. By 

 lying down I was able to look over and test the height by 

 timing the fall of stones. The bottom of this lateral pit, as of 

 the main crater, was comparatively level, without cones, and 

 gave no indications of the source whence the fresh black lava 

 that covered it had issued. At my former visit in 1864 there 

 were two cones in Moliuaweoweo about 200 feet high near 

 the eastern wall. In 1870, when Mr. Luther Severance as- 

 cended the mountain, there were no cones, although the bot- 

 tom was much broken and sloped from west to east. From his 

 sketch we learn that at f* the wall was very steep ; at e the 

 height was estimated at 1,200 feet; at A were sulphur banks 

 smoking, but not violently ; e marks the point where the trail 

 from Kapapala ends ; d the point where Mr. Mann and I came 

 to the crater in 1864 ; b is the small southern crater, Pohaku 

 Hanalei, and a is where I found the wall tottering in 1880. 



* For these letters, see Mr. Alexander's map, plate 2, to which they have 

 been transferred.' The crater called Pohaku Hanalei by Mr. Brigham is the South 

 Crater of Mr. Alexander. — j. d. d. 



