VOLCANO!!!!

 That's a quote from the trail register at the Amboy Crater, a volcano that we climbed today. Yes, we climbed a volcano, right into the crater.  The question in the trail register was, "Why are you here?" and "VOLCANO!!!!" was somebody's highly appropriate, if excitable answer. That's why we were there, too.

First, our route for today, from Jim and Mary Ellen's to the Best Western Settler's Point at Washington, Utah, an extremely nice hotel that I'll have more to say about later.

The volcano is located where the blue line jogs from left to right, just below the I40 symbol. Here's a shot of how it looks from overhead, with hardened black basaltic lava still streaming away toward the southeast after some ancient eruption. Actually, there is much more black lava around the volcano than you can see here. It's absolutely everywhere, from big hardened outcrops to smaller stones and pebbles of black rock filled with holes, on all sides of the volcano.  Apparently, the volcano last erupted 10,000 years ago and at least 3 times before that, creating what the brochure calls "nested" cinder cones within the crater.  

 It's in the Mojave desert, in the middle of what Jim and Mary Ellen call "The Big Empty" -- that is, the middle of nowhere -- on the way from their house in Yucca Valley, CA to Interstate 15 heading north toward Nevada and Utah.  You can see it from miles away, in the middle of a vast flat plain where a huge industrial surface mining operation is going on.  Long, deep ditches lined both sides of the road, interrupted sometimes by large rectangular bare areas.  The wind was stiff and a fine, pale dust filled the air, masking the view of the surrounding mountains.  Very eerie and dystopian.  Okay, it turns out that it's National Chloride Co-America and they are mining calcium chloride through some kind of liquid process.  Just to give you a general idea of the weirdness of it, here are a couple of pictures, not taken by me as you can see.  

Oh and, by the way, this mine and the volcano are both situated on Route 66, now known (at least in that part of California) as a National Trails Highway. Nearby is Roy's Motel and Cafe, a landmark from back in the day with vintage cars parked by its neon sign.

So, the volcano. It was 103 degrees, not ideal weather for volcano-hopping. But the sky was overcast, there was a stiff breeze cooling things down a bit, and it's only a mile from the parking area to the crater, most of it pretty level -- so we thought we'd try it. And we're glad we did!

The volcano seen from the parking lot.  Fortunately, it isn't as big or as far away as it looks when you first start the hike. 

The trail winds across rough, rocky ground interrupted with clumps of basaltic lava, and for most of the way it's flat, easy going. There were signs about wildlife that we might see, like the chuckwalla lizard that apparently likes to live in lava fields, but we did not encounter any such critters.  The whole area was burned black, hot and silent, almost as if the last eruption had happened last year.

Here's where the climb to the crater begins -- you can see the switchbacks on the right-hand side. The volcano is 250 feet high, but the climb to the crater is less than that because there's a break in the crater wall where -- like Mt. St. Helens -- a past eruption blew out sideways rather than straight up.  Here's the break, seen from within.

 The switchbacks made the climb fairly gentle, but the rocks and sand were loose and treacherous underfoot and the heat was catching up with us.  We were working pretty hard, or I was, anyway. The breeze helped, but it was stiff enough as we climbed higher to feel sometimes as if it might just blow us right off the edge of the path and down over all that crumbly, sharp lava rock. 

And here's the actual crater!

It wasn't very deep, with a narrow inner rim of black cinders making a ring around the white hardened bottom, which one of the brochures called a "lava lake."  Then there's a second, higher ring -- not shown clearly in my photos -- that must have been one of the "nested cones" described in the brochure. And the outermost ring is the rim of the volcano itself. You can see the path leading up to the rim on the left.  Dad climbed up there. If you enlarge the photo and look hard, you can see him up there in this shot.

I

and even more clearly in this one! He said the view was spectacular. I took him at his word. I was pretty hot and wrung out, and also pleased to have made it to the crater at all. So I stayed in the crater and took photos.

 

Then we climbed back down and hiked back out, arriving back at the car soaking wet and very glad for air conditioning. My hair was still wet at the back of my neck many hours later, when we got to the hotel. On the way out, we passed a couple of guys hiking in, who said they were glad to discover they weren't the only crazy ones. We agreed. 103 is very hot indeed and, in general, nobody hikes around here in July, even relatively short hikes like this one.  But this was something we had never seen before and were never going to see again, and we wouldn't have missed it for the world. 

I'm not going to try to cover everything else we saw today right now, because it's too much. We had quite a day. Maybe I'll come back later to tell you about the Kelso Sand Dunes, the Mojave Road, or the sharp acrid smell like something burning that filled the desert air after it rained a little in the afternoon making us think at first that something was wrong with the car, until we realized that the smell was everywhere and that we were smelling the creosote bushes, or chapparal, that carpeted the desert everywhere.  For now, I'll just quickly show you the Red Barrel cactus we found along the Mojave Road, the only red thing in miles and miles of sand and olive green and the only one we saw anywhere. So weird and beautiful, standing out like a Christmas ornament or gift, maybe a basket that somebody wove and left in the middle of the desert for some lucky wanderer to find.