A Snapshot and The Scoop: Sunset Crater

This thousand-foot high cinder cone is just a baby in terms of geological time, coming to life with a roar and fountain of lava and dying after a few months or short years. Cinder cones like Sunset Crater Volcano are formed when a certain type of magma containing a lot of basalt becomes pressurized, spraying up into the air and cooling in little fragments as the pieces land back on earth. Sunset Crater is surrounded by lava fields and other small cinder hills as well, remnants of its short-lived explosions. It gets its name from the red color of the cinders at the rim, with early explorers and native americans variously naming the mountain "red hill", "burnt land", "yellow mountain" and "sunset mountain". Eventually the name Sunset Crater stuck, and now we know it as a national monument preserving one of the youngest extinct volcanoes in the U.S.

Leave me a comment below and tell me another name for Sunset Crater. What would you have called it?

A Snapshot and The Scoop: A Will to Live

Life truly will find a way to live. Did you know Ponderosa Pines will sprial in harsh conditions to help stablize their structure? I had no idea trees could do this, until I visited Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and saw the skeletons of ponderosas blasted by the extinct volcano's most recent explosion, where the strips of exposed wood, devoid of bark, do indeed spiral up the trunk. The branches of the tree (what were left, anyway) sprialed and knotted as well, giving the tree a gnarled look that spoke of a tough will to live. The conditions of growing on an active volcano can't have been easy, but you have to give the trees props for trying. Even now, a thousand years later, only a few trees dot the cinder cone and the surrounding lava fields, sucking at the knife-sharp rocks to try to get a hold on the land. Someday the trees will win and life will return to the volcano.

Leave me a comment below and tell me if you knew trees could spiral. How neat!