This morning felt a little bit like that day we hit up all the touristy stuff in California. And a quick pack up of the cars revealed what we’d spend the rest of the day dealing with:
The snowy drive out from Wild Spirit was much shorter on this end. We started at El Morro National Monument to check out Inscription Rock, a cliffside near an oasis pool that features petroglyphs dating back hundreds of years. Native Americans, many Spanish Explorers, and some early American settlers and railroad survey crews all passed by El Morro for its water — and left inscriptions of their names and dates as they passed by. The longest inscriptions were left by Spanish Conquistadors, formally offering dates and names ending with “pasó por aquí,” meaning “passed by this way.”
Then just down the road, we hit up the Bandera Volcano and Lava Tubes and Ice Cave. Having visited a glacial cave this summer which was made of ice with a river running through it, this little ice cave felt a little oversold. It was a cave of volcanic rock that acted as a water filter. The cold of the cave kept the water frozen year-round, so this this wasn’t an “ice cave” as in “cave made of ice,” it was an ice cave as in “a source of ice.” The nearby settlements in the late 1800s and early 1900s “mined” the ice for their own uses before the trading post closed down and was later resurrected into this tourist attraction and museum.
Up the other end of the trail, we saw the Bandera volcano overlook. The volcano erupted in such a way that near-ground tubes of lava allowed a flow of lava rock throughout this area. In the primary crater and from breaches of these lava tubes, lava spewed into the air, hardening as it fell, into the surrounding landscape in lava stone.
After that, we tried to go down the Chain of Craters Backcountry Byway along the El Malpais National Monument. “El Malpais” is Spanish for “The Badlands,” named for these lava-rich landscapes. The rock is treacherous, brittle to walk on, is a great home for snakes, and causes injuries to animals and livestock. And El Malpais National Monument, El Malpias National Conservation Area, and surrounding National Forest land are full of these deposits.
But the start of the byway was marked with this.
To what extent does snowfall count as “wet?” … The boys recalled seeing a more thorough warning from the NPS about what can happen if you don’t heed this warning:
So we decided to go elsewhere. We took a collection of forest roads through the Cibola National Forest from the Ice Cave area into Grants, NM.
Our impromptu and entirely snow-covered route ran through Bonita Canyon, Zuni Canyon, and a little detour we invented in the Cibola National Forest. It was a lot of fun. We played around among the snow and the lava fields — since some of this drive also ran through some parts of El Malpais.
As we started to consider what our plans should be for the evening, we made a few observations. Tonight’s low would be 15. The secret to success at San Lorenzo appeared to be tied to a lack of wind, which would be hard to replicate. Something about a recent meal left more than one of us hoping for access to a bathroom…. And also Miles yak’d on Evan’s pillow during our snow-drive. So our campsite tonight is less adventurous than originally anticipated, but the heaters are awesome. And a civilized dinner was quite pleasant.
