All work and no play....

We took a day off to visit the orchid gardens near the village of Volcano. This is just a small sample of the plants on display...enjoy!



Earlier in the day, we sat in on a free workshop (at the zoo!) on how to grow orchids at home. We went right out and bought two of our favorites!

Ripping

This is what I mean by "bigger machinery! This is a D-9 Caterpillar tractor...50 tons of unfettered power. To "rip" the site, the operator uses a 3-foot-long claw to tear up the lava bed. As he goes back and forth, the weight of the tractor crushes the large blocks and consolidates the base.















Because our site had high and low spots, we did a "cut-and-fill" operation to level the house pad.

This is Katie surveying the finished job which took about five hours of dozer time....at $600/hour, you can do the math!

This is a huge step in our building process. We now have a useable site on which we can start construction. We are very happy with the results...and can imagine sitting on the lanai with our gin and POG (passion fruit/orange/guava juice) in hand. The next step will be to layout the house corners, water catchment tank, and cesspool locations.

Grubbing

This is the area that we had identified as the new house site. It was a natural clearing, so it wouldn't necessitate cutting a lot of ohi'as. It had a nice southern exposure with an open view of the lot...and it seemed to be pretty level. The next step was "grubbing;" a local term meaning to clear away the vegetation and expose the lava surface. For this, we required slightly larger machinery.

This is an older D-4 Caterpillar arriving under cover of waning twilight. The owner/operator said he "would just take it slow" since no one was sure what lay beneath the uluhe. Stories abound of huge D-9's disappearing into lava tubes.

Here the tractor is breaking through some small ohi'a into the clearing. It's hot, wet, and muddy; but so far, no surprises. We have uncovered a small lava dike that crosses the lot.

This is the result of about six hours work...no large trees felled and no lava tubes. Under only inches of soil, there appears to be a shield of fairly soft lava, but the lot is uneven and sloped and will have to "ripped"...by even bigger equipment.

Eden Roc: Raw !

This is our "street" in Eden Roc. Notice the wide lanes and numerous traffic control devices! There are power poles but no power lines...this is common in this area.















Here is the front of one of the lots. The trees are ohi'a which arrive early on the new lava but grow very slowly. These trees are sacred to Pele, the volcano goddess, so we will try to cut as few as possible as we develop a driveway and building site. The fern-like groundcover is uluhe which grows in dense mats and make it impossible to see what lies beneath.



















In order to get under the uluhe, we bought a gasoline-powered brushsaw which worked pretty well once you got the feel of it. Soon we could begin to see the ground, and started in toward the area we had tentatively chosen as the house site. Here you can see the first fifteen feet or so of what was to become an S-shaped driveway.















This photo will give you a better idea of the results after brushcutting. The uluhe almost collapses and can be tramped down. Then you can get a better lay of the land and expose hidden holes, lava dikes, or downed trees.

Beginnings

David writes:

Katie lived in Hawaii for four years when her father, who was in the Air Force, was stationed there back in 1959-63. During that time, Hawaii became the 50th state and Kilauea Iki erupted. She fell in love with the Islands and made a promise to herself to return someday....and live there if the gods agreed. In 2005, she bought two one-acre lots in Mountain View on the Big Island. The lots are in Eden Roc which is a rural subdivision on the south slope of Mauna Loa only 15 miles from Volcano National Park. She chose that locale for a lot of reasons... one was the price...land on the Hilo side of the Big Island is still relatively cheap...but she was also attracted to "aloha spirit" there, the feeling of community, the slower pace of life, the privacy, and the sheer beauty and diversity of the island.