El Malpais National Monument

Twenty miles east of El Morro National Monument on NM 53 is El Malpais National Monument. El Morro offered the traveler water and shade, El Malpais, the badlands, offered a landscape to avoid.

We drove about five miles down a dirt and gravel county road and then another three or four on a badly rutted dirt park road to get to the Big Tubes Area.

The park road parallels the 10,900 year old Bandera lava flow. The lava flow goes on with tubes and trenches for 17 miles. Here you can see it, nearly as tall as the trees.

It looks more like mine tailings than a natural landscape.

There was a trail taking you back to the “big tubes”, the hollow tubes left behind when the outside lava cools and the inner, molten lava flows on. This was not a trail that Matey could walk on, so Bud and Matey waited while I hiked in to see it and get some pictures.

The only way to tell where to go was to look for the cairns of lava rocks. They were not far apart, but even so it was sometimes hard to pick them out from the general rubble.

After less than half a mile I came to a sign where the trail formed a loop. I was not sure I wanted to go further. I was afraid I might twist my ankle or fall and cut my hands and knees. I decided to go up to the top of a slight hill to my left.

There I found a caved in portion of one of the lava tubes. I’m standing on the edge of the caved in tube and it’s at least 15 feet to the bottom. At the top of the picture you can see the bridge formed by a portion of the tube that remains.

I took my picture and turned back. Even though I had just been this way it took some care to find the cairns.

This is the “soil” after 10,000 years of weathering.

This tree was not having an easy time of it, but it was still alive, still growing.

And this cactus looked like it was getting ready to bloom, rooted in bare lava rocks.

On our way out we stopped at a place where I could climb up and get a shot of the expanse of the lava flow. Not a place to take a horse and wagon!

We returned to the highway and drove another few miles to the oldest lava flow in the monument, El Calderon. This had a nice level trail that all of us could walk.

Here the lava had a thin layer of soil and grass; junipers and Douglas fir were growing, but there were still areas of bare rock.

There were broken lava tubes. Two breaks formed the twin sinks, Bud is in front of the larger one.

It was pretty deep.

The smaller sink was just uphill, on the other side of the trail.

We walked about three quarters of a mile up to two caves that had a common opening. This is Xenolith Cave. A xenolith is a piece of rock found in other rock; usually, as here, rock trapped in igneous magma.

The other, larger cave is Bat Cave. All the caves are now closed.

That did not change our plans, these were not trails we were planning to take!

This older lava flow made a much more pleasing landscape.

But even after 115,000 years of weathering there was barely enough soil to cover the rocks.