El Malpais National Monument

While camping at Bar S RV Park near Grants, New Mexico, we got to learn about all things volcanic. It seems this part of the state has been a hot bed of volcanic activity for millions of years. Driving down I-40, the casual tourist can't help but see all the black lava beds in the area. But we're going up close with a stop at El Malpais National Monument. After gearing up with maps and permits, our first stop is the Sandstone Cliffs. We climbed to the edge, and you can barely see Mark standing on top of the cliff. From this vantage point, we look over never-ending miles of black lava flows in the valley below.

The rains from yesterday have filled the nooks and crannies on top of the sandstone cliffs with water.

Just down the road is the star of the national monument--La Ventana Arch. It's a quarter mile walk to take a picture of one of New Mexico's largest natural arches.

But by climbing straight up over sizable boulders, we could get a closer view. La Ventana means "the window," and from this angle we can see the blue sky under the arch.

In fact, we could climb directly under to see the arch from the bottom.

Some arches are hard to capture in a picture. But La Ventana is very photogenic. It was tough climbing, but we wandered underneath this wonder for quite some time. You can see Denisa in the bottom left hand corner.

The last El Malpais stop for the day is the Lava Waterfall Trail. Now instead of looking down on the lava from afar, we are walking right on it.

We are following a mile-long loop of rock cairns and a booklet that explains the different lava formations. It obviously describes it more elegantly, but we found sometimes the lava bubbles up into giant hills.

Other times it collapses into sink holes.

At the bottom of those sink holes can be entrances into lava tunnels. The air coming out of this little tunnel is around 40 degrees. Mark knows because he was experiencing that cool air by crawling down into the entrance.

Some of the entrances are big enough to climb into, and it's a nice place to cool off on a warm day in the desert.

It's a world of cracks and crevices with puddles of hot lava frozen in time. All this lava  is the result of the McCartys Volcano. The youngest of the lava flows in this region, it erupted a mere 3,000 years ago.

It was fun to explore another of this country's national monuments. We had a good day exploring another new-to-us part of New Mexico. At the visitor center we filled out the paper work for a permit that will allow us to explore even more of El Malpais. Stay tuned for more wandering His wonders as we go down under into the lava tubes.