We laze around camp waiting for it to cool off then head for the trailhead about 4PM.  Oops, it is a 2 ½ mile trail, if you go down into the crater and who wouldn’t, and it gets dark here by 6PM.  We know that it is a rocky uneven climb so not something we want to finish in the dark.  New plan, we will hike it tomorrow morning then head on to Mojave Preserve.   The overflow lot is a perfect place to boondock.  We do a lot of train watching.  This big valley seems to be a staging area for the many east-west trains that move through this part of the country.  They were lined up like huge caterpillars as we came into the valley and I am sure that one moved through here every half hour all evening and most of the night.  We got in some great dark sky star viewing. 

Monday morning the temperature is about right and the sun beautiful but the wind is going to make an exposed hike on the cinder cone rim an interesting event.  We are up for it.  Up close, even the lava flow area doesn’t seem quite so barren.  There are wildflowers, lizards including chuckwalla and a beautifully colored green -blue lizard plus more of our usual desert birds.  The ascent up the one trail is loose rock and steep…I regret wearing shorts.  Fractured and wind eroded lava and pumice make for pretty abrasive stuff that will create some pretty severe trail rash.  We climb up, down through the crater, back up a really awful trail to the rim, walk about half the rim with only a few stops when the wind threatened to blow us off, back into the crater – another trail that is steep and loose rock- then back to the lava field.  I can’t help but imagine the power involved when this erupted.  It must have been amazing and they claim it was only 500 years ago.