Welcome to Mordor!

I visited Craters of the Moon National Monument for the first time today. I had expected it to be interesting, but probably not amazing, since I had been to Hawaii Volcanoes NP many times...also to Haleakala. But I was blown away by Craters! It's a landscape of amazing beauty, wildness, and complexity. Anyone who is a Lord of the Rings fan will recognize this landscape...Sauron would love it here! The amazing thing is that this a'a lava is two thousand years old, and still virtually nothing has grown on it. The climate here is continental and dry, with six months of freezing nights, hot summer days, and only about ten inches of precipitation per year. In many places the lava looks as fresh as if it had flowed 20 years ago instead of 2000. Spatter cones are in the background. Most of the lava here flowed out of fissures that extended at least 50 miles across the Snake River Plain.

I've taken tons of pahoehoe pictures over the years, but none since I started blogging...until now. Pahoehoe is hot, viscous lava that often flows rapidly. A'a is much more chunky, and often impassable on foot. It results when lava cools and flows more slowly than in its pahoehoe state.

This pic shows a'a on the left, pahoehoe on the right, and blooming sagebrush in the foreground. Couldn't find that in Hawaii! Blow it up for more detail.

This is a shot of Big Crater. As usual, the wind was blowing from the southwest when it last erupted, so the northeast side...to the center and right of the picture...is higher due to the greater volume of volcanic debris deposited there. Various minerals and chemical compositions account for the different colored rocks in the crater. This area has seen no volcanic activity in the past two thousand years but the rift zone is still considered active and will most likely erupt again. Who knows when? could be next year, or a few millennia from now. I have over forty pictures of Craters that I liked...can't blog them all. Suffice to say it's an amazingly beautiful and interesting place. There are many hiking trails and I'll be back to explore the place in more detail.