Even though the crater is a very dry environment, you will find life here including the silversword and insects found nowhere else on earth. The thing I noticed first about the crater is the incredible scale of it. It's immense. You can see miles in each direction from one rim to the other. On this clear day we were able to see the Big Island some 35 miles distant. We noticed that the what we thought was sand was really volcanic cinders. Then, we realized that the cinders weren't a single color, but an amalgam of a hundred different colors. There was gold, yellow, pink, red, gray, and shades of magenta.