“Have you ever been to the Great Crack?”

The first time I asked this at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park visitor center, I already suspected that it might be the beginning of a wild adventure. But I never could have imagined how many more times I would need to repeat that absurd-sounding question.

A few weeks prior, SFGATE Hawaii contributing editor Christine Hitt had told me there was something called the Great Crack, an 8-mile fissure across a remote region of the Big Island’s national park. Because I had an upcoming trip to the park, she wanted me to hike there and write a story about it.  

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It wasn’t hard to confirm the crack’s existence. The words “Great Crack” were clearly labeled on the map I was given by a park employee at the entrance. It is within the Kilauea volcano’s southwest rift zone not far from a state highway, but no established trail accesses it. I had also read on a park webpage that the crack measures up to 50 feet across and plunges 66 feet down into the earth, although there wasn’t much more information.

Ohia lehua branches appear to rise directly out of the jet-black ground. 

At the visitor center, the park volunteer I asked about the crack shook her head. “I’m not familiar with that term,” she said, and then handed me off to another volunteer. He had seen pictures, he said, but had never been and “didn’t want to advise anybody about it.” 

“It’s very large, and very deep, and I wouldn’t go alone,” he said, and then suggested asking about it at the backcountry permit office down the road. That didn’t help. 

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The Great Crack in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is an 8-mile-long fissure in the earth, but other features of the crack extend for 10 more miles.

“None of us have been there,” a ranger at the permit office told me. 

“I’ve not heard many people even talk about it,” another employee chimed in. “I’m not even sure where it’s at. Have you Googled it?”

The employee then Googled it on an old desktop and learned that yes, it was in the park. “Is this for, like, a campsite?” she asked. I said I didn’t think so. We weren’t getting anywhere.

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But with every clueless person I spoke with, my curiosity deepened.

How could an 8-mile gash through a national park famous for its geologic features be a mystery to every employee I spoke with? I was determined to find out — and to find that crack.

What is the Great Crack?

If you are imagining the Great Crack as one clean break in the earth, stop it, because the crack is actually an extensive network of fractures, fissures and volcanic cones. And while the main fissure measures 8 miles long, the other features of the crack extend for 10 more. In online photos, some areas of the crack make it appear that the walls could fit together like pieces in a puzzle, suggesting that the ground was ripped apart by some unthinkably violent force. 

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An oohia lehua tree extends skyward from within Hawaii’s Great Crack.

Scientists believe volcanic forces created the Great Crack, but nobody knows for sure how or when it formed.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is home to two of the most active volcanoes on the planet, making the landscape a constant flux of molten magma and freshly created land. And while scientists believe magma moved into the southwest rift zone, causing the ground to pull apart and create the Great Crack, nobody knows for sure when it formed. Nobody knows what lies beneath it. And perhaps most disturbingly, no one knows what prompted it to spew unusually fast-moving lava that destroyed a village during an 1823 eruption — or if it might again.

The 1823 eruption, known as the Keaiwa eruption, released lava at one........

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