OurNextStop: Valley of Fires

The black mass in the valley floor below!

We left ABQ about mid-AM and headed south toward Holloman AFB in Alamogordo, NM. About 90 miles down I-25 we turned east on US 380 and tooling along talking about how long we would stay at Holloman AFB and what we would do. As we were descending a grade into Tularosa Valley we noted this large black mass in the valley floor. It was miles wide and extended out of sight to the north and south.

The 44 mile long black mass from above!

We were fascinated by this obvious mass and tried to figure out what it was. I even said it was a lava flow, but was only joking.

Here is a “big picture” of what we were looking at courtesy of Google Earth. That black scar down the center of the picture was what we were looking at and we were heading east toward where that small icon “A” is.

At the bottom of the grade we finally got to the black mass and it was a lava flow, not active thank heavens! Surprisingly plants were abundant and seemingly growing right out of the black lava. The road went right through the lava field and near the other side we saw a campground on an “island of land” in the lava field. It was a BLM recreation area. We went on by and shortly came to Carrizozo, a nearby city where we stopped for lunch. Over a great Mexican meal we decided to put our trip to Holloman on hold and return to the campground in the lava flow!

We learned this was a relatively young lava flow, geologically speaking. It erupted from vents in the valley floor about 4,000 years ago. It is as wide as 3+ miles in some places and covers over 125 square miles of the valley that has White Sands National Monument at the opposite end of the 200 mile long valley. The flow is as deep as 160 ft in some places. At several locations there are peaks in the valley floor that were not overcome by the lava and became islands in the flow. The campground was on one of these islands which was about .7 miles long and .5 miles wide. A close up of the campground/island from Google Earth is shown here. The while line to the left of the island is a interruptive boardwalk through the lava field.

The campground "island" in the lava field

We walked the boardwalk a number of times and each time it was something new. The light on the coal black lava was always changing. It seemed like it was a frozen sea with waves up to 20 ft high and small ripples frozen in time. As the flow cooled from the outside strange things happened. Air pockets formed in the still molten inner core, sometimes they were very small and other places they were the size of a room. Eventually, a lot of these caved in as the flow weathered. They then became areas that provided protection for the animals that were learning to live on the flow or plants that were starting to populate it. Some animal species adopted their coloring to make them less noticeable in the black lava flow. The same species living 100 miles south in the White Sands area have a lighter color to make them less noticeable in their environment.

This was an interesting place and we enjoyed our two unexpected days there and we plan on coming back to visit again. In fact they have 3 campground host couples there and this will be one place we will certainly consider being volunteer hosts at!