In, and Under, El Malpais
Ever been inside a lava tube? Yeah, me neither, leastwise until this last Saturday when I ventured out to El Malpais National Monument. El Malpais is 590 square miles of exactly what the name means in Spanish: bad country. Beautiful, mind you, but oh my is it rough, an area half the size of Rhode Island composed of trackless lava stretching between the Zuni Mountains, Cebollita Mesa and Mesa Negra in northwest New Mexico.
In geologic time, the volcanic eruptions in this area are fairly recent, occurring during the last three million years. The most recent of these were late enough to have impacted early humans occupying the area, an occupation that goes back to about 10,000 BC, and creating some interesting legends.
Hot, black lava-blood flowed from the eyes of the angry KauBat’. His sons, the Twins, had blinded their father to punish him for his ruthless gambling. He had wagered with their people until they were destitute.
Now the Twins watched awestruck as the foul liquid poured from KauBat’s eyesockets, chasing them home to the pueblo where they were born. The mass of lava curled into deep ravines and wide canyons. Heat waves wore paths into the sky and singed the feathers of birds flying overhead. The curious raven flew too close and was instantly turned the color of charcoal.
The kachina’s thick lava-blood destroyed all that lay in its path. As it cooled, it solidified into serpentine ropes and cresting waves of black rock. Eons of rain and snow had little effect on the frozen lava-stone.
El Malpais as it is today was created by lava flows pouring from some thirty volcanoes and more than eighty vents and spatter cones. This is some serious rock strewn about and you wouldn’t think anything could grow here and yet life has a way of overcoming all obstacles. On the surface you’ll find aspen, pinyon and juniper growing alongside towering ponderosa and Douglas fir.
Continue reading: In, and Under, El Malpais
Despite spending my formative years during a time when every true American was searching for pinkos in the shadows and 1 in 3 were digging up their backyards to install a fallout shelter, I never developed the prerequisite fear of ‘The Bomb’ required of that age.
‘The Bomb’ was developed in Los Alamos, located in the Jemez Mountains about an hour northwest of Albuquerque, and tested down at the Trinity site in White Sands, two plus hours southeast of here. White Sands is a desolate landscape of rugged canyons and foothills, rolling grasslands, ever shifting sand dunes and forever frozen lava flows. Snakes, scorpions, a lone hawk or buzzard overhead, the occasional coyote or oryx on the ground are about the only signs of life. Like most everyplace in New Mexico, both locations are pretty much in the middle of nowhere, which, I suppose, made sense since the Manhattan Project was this big secret. Even today, sixty years after the fact, it would be easy to keep a big secret in New Mexico.
I visited the Trinity site last year and have to say I was impressed with it despite my lack of any significant feeling about ‘the Bomb’. There is a sense of history there, an eerie sense that something big happened. The site itself hasn’t changed much. The twisted steel roots of the tower jut out of the ground. Several bunkers for test equipment poke above the flat land like the crusted shells of giant turtles. The house, several miles away, where the scientists and technicians stayed, was open for the tour.
There are still pieces of trinitite scattered about, formed when the heat of the first atomic blast melted the white sand, hardening it and turning it green. The military removed most of it years ago, buried it in some cave and sealed it off. There are warnings all over about collecting what small pieces are left, which, of course, most everyone ignores, including me (the radioactivity is minimal, about what you’d get from a watch with a glow-in-the-dark dial). About the only thing that has changed over the years is the fence that surrounds the site and the stone obelisk that marks ground zero.
