Thursday, April 22, 2021
SUNSET CRATER VOLCANO
National Monument
How can I have gone so long without any idea how volcanic the Southwest is? I suppose it isn’t newsworthy since none of the volcanoes is active (at least not within the last thousand years), but just about all the geology down here is volcanic, and as a volcano enthusiast, I feel indignant that no one thought to tell me. 😋
Since climbing to the tops of as many volcanoes as possible is one of my current missions, visiting Sunset Crater Volcano NM obviously went onto my list as soon as I discovered it. Well. Turns out you can’t actually climb to this crater. It’s too fragile. I’ll have to settle for climbing the nearby O’Leary Peak, a trail that provides a view down into Sunset Crater. Unfortunately, that’s a ten-mile hike, so probably best not started at 4pm.
Instead, we hiked every other trail in the park. Lenox Crater, a much older and more extinct volcano, provided lovely scenery and was an okay volcano-climbing booby prize. The Lava Flow, Bonito Vista, and A’a trails took us down into the field of crumbled basalt produced by the lava flow that concluded Sunset’s eruption a thousand years ago.
I particularly enjoyed the splatter cone, a mini volcanic cone created when the upper layer of lava cools, then a little more molten lava squeezes out, splattering out in a ring pattern. It’s exactly like the boiling mud pots in Yellowstone, except the mud is, y’know, literally boiling.
(I guess not all the doodles can be winners.)
Thither & Yon 