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?
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