Volcanoes shaped this place. Some of it as recently as 3000 years ago.  At first glance you’d think; why would we need to preserve or protect this rugged useless land?  Well, look a bit closer.  It is pretty amazing.  El Malpais, the badlands, is contained within a National Monument and National Conservation Area.

Soot black, fractured flows of basalt reach across the flat lands edged with soaring sandstone cliffs. From above it is a foreboding landscape of cracks and sinks and heaves.

Close up along the Lava Falls Trail it is still pretty daunting but with careful footsteps it is great to explore. We step over deep crevasse, skirt huge sinkholes, follow the path of curved flows of pahoehoe lava, and tread purposefully through the jumbled plies of rock that are fractured a’a lava.  There is an amazing natural amphitheatre formed when cooling lava puffed like rising bread in a ring around older cool lava and created a sort of bowl.

Our boots crunch on first black then red cinders that radiate out from El Calderon, the Cinder Cone that spewed out bits of the then molten rock some 115,000 years ago. Molten rock flowed too leaving miles of lava tubes explore (if you are into that sort of cavy thing!).  Keep in mind that a huge colony of Mexican free tailed bats calls this place their summer home.  Collapsed tubes form trenches and bowls and sinkholes.  Liquidy lava squeezing up through cracks forms odd humps and ridges.  Lichen and ferns, pinon pine and juniper grab a tenuous foothold and create the habitat for a surprising number of animals.  Like lava fields we have seen before, this is a very cool place.