Kaumana Caves Big Island Ceramic Art Tile
— a room the lava poured itself out of.
Not only on a wall.
“Four miles west of downtown Hilo, the road bends past a collapsed skylight where ferns spill into the ground. Down a steel staircase, the air drops ten degrees and the floor turns to cooled lava: knobbed, glassy, wet underfoot. The tube runs in two directions from the skylight, narrow then wide, dark where the flashlight stops. Above it, banana trees and the hum of the highway. Below, a quiet that has been there since 1881, when the river of fire that nearly took Hilo finally drained itself out through here.
Kaumana Caves Big Island Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Kaumana Caves State Park sits four miles west of downtown Hilo on Kaumana Drive, the lower stretch of what becomes Saddle Road as it climbs toward Mauna Kea. The park covers the collapsed skylight of a lava tube that runs 2.026 surveyed miles beneath the eastern flank of Mauna Loa, the shield volcano that forms most of the Big Island. From the parking pullout, a steel staircase drops into the skylight; from there the tube opens in two directions through cooled basalt. Hilo, the largest town on the windward side of the Big Island, sees some of the heaviest annual rainfall in the United States, and the ferns at the cave mouth never run short of water.
The tube is the survivor of a single event: the 1880-1881 Mauna Loa eruption, one of the longest historic eruptions of the volcano. The flow began in November 1880 high on the northeast rift and ran for nine months toward Hilo Bay. By June 1881 it was within five miles of the village; by August it had closed to a mile and a half, threatening the harbour, the churches, and the town. The eruption stopped that month, and Hawaiian tradition credits Princess Ruth Keʻelikōlani, Royal Governor of the island, who travelled up Mauna Loa and prayed in front of the advancing lava. The tube at Kaumana is what the flow left when its molten centre drained away.
The park is free and open from dawn to dusk, managed by the Hawaiʻi Division of State Parks. Parking is a narrow pullout on Kaumana Drive, opposite a small restroom; the descent is a single staircase into the skylight, then a short scramble onto cooled basalt. Inside there is no lighting and almost no signage. Visitors carry their own flashlights, watch for low ceilings, and turn back when the light from the entrance fades. The floor is uneven, wet in places, and broken by collapse rubble. The right-hand tube is wider and shorter; the left runs longer and narrows. Closed-toe shoes, a head-lamp, and a backup flashlight are the standard kit for anything past the entrance chamber.