Lava Lands!

On Friday, we had a chance to run out and explore Lava Lands - otherwise known as the Newberry National Volcanic Monument - which lies about 10 miles south of Bend.  It reminded us a great deal of Craters of the Moon National Monument, although the volcanic features and forces that formed it were different in a number of ways.

Lava Butte is the most visible feature when you arrive at the visitor center:

From Lava Butte, it was possible to get a clear, 360 degree view of the entire Deschutes Valley.  Here is a photo looking north along US 97 toward Bend and Pilot Butte in the center-right of the photo below:

The view itself is a lesson in geology.  Here's a photo of Mount Bachelor, with a great shot of the lava fields directly below Lava Butte.  The pyroclastic flows went just so far, so it appears they have a distinct end.  In places, trees and other vegetation are starting to make inroads, but because the lava flow is so young, there are many, many years yet to go before the plants will reclaim the land:

Our second stop was the Lava River Cave.  It is almost exactly 1 mile long and higher than most auto or railroad tunnels.  It gives a feeling of immense, dark, cold space.  Here's a photo of David just inside the mouth of the cave.  We needed lanterns to navigate our way in the pitch black darkness:

Here is a shot from inside the cave, looking back at the mouth.  This cave was much easier to navigate than the caves we explored in Craters of the Moon, which were generally smaller and with narrower entrances.

Our camera had trouble with the utter darkness of the cave, but we did get one or two good photos.  Here's one of Kathy looking up at the vaulted ceilings which were maybe 50 feet high in places:

David is exploring some of the structures that would be formed on the cave walls from the lava that streamed through the tubes:

After the Lava River Cave, we drove about 20 miles down to the actual Newberry Crater and the Big Obsidian Flow, which was the most recent extrusion from the crater area.  The obsidian is rhyolite that is mixed with large amounts of silica and superheated until the silica becomes glasslike.  As it erupts into the air, it cools and breaks into boulders - large and small.  It flows across the landscape, much like pahoehoe.  When the pressure below ground that is pushing it subsides, the flow does too.  In the photo below, it's easy to see where the flow simply ceased - for good:

Kathy got up close and personal with a boulder of obsidian -

- and David found an entire throne of obsidian and took advantage of it to rest.  We thought perhaps this should be one of the kingdoms in "Game of Thrones":  the Obsidian Throne.

No successful trip is complete without a selfy or a shadow photo or something like that.  So here is our selfy from the Big Obsidian Flow: