Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument

Author's Comments

The first time I walked the Lava Flow Trail I was struck by how recent it all felt. A thousand years is nothing to stone, and the basalt here still looks like it cooled last week - jagged, glassy in places, holding its shapes the way bread holds the marks of the oven. The cinder fields around the cone are the color of wet coal, and in late afternoon in September the low sun rakes across them and pulls every ridge into relief. This is the hour the monument earns its name. The cone itself flushes red and orange at the rim where oxidized cinders catch the last light, and for maybe twenty minutes the whole landscape goes molten again in a quiet, photographic way. The monument gates close at sunset, which is its own kind of frustration if you came for stars. But the forest road that loops through to Wupatki stays open, and the pullouts along it offer the same dark sky and the same volcanic foreground without the gate. I have set up there on August nights when the Milky Way arched directly over the cone and the basalt in the foreground caught just enough ambient light to read as texture rather than void. Bring a headlamp with a red filter. Bring more layers than you think you need - Flagstaff sits at seven thousand feet and the temperature drops fast once the sun is gone. Spring and fall are kindest. Summer afternoons can bring monsoon cells that are spectacular from a distance and dangerous up close. Watch the sky to the south and give the storms their room.

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