Fire and Ice. The Mother Road Episode 20

Having thoroughly enjoyed Albuquerque and now with two fully functioning AC units (phew) Scott spotted our next side trip …the Bandera Crater, Fire and Ice.

To reach a convenient jumping off point for Bandera, we picked a campground in Milan, New Mexico….The Bar S. Great little campground. As we progressed across the continent with increasing temperatures, I was learning to check google maps satellite view and choose campgrounds with shade trees…..!!!

So…to Milan, a tiny town just off the highway, with a 30 minute drive to Bandera. After I made the booking, I spotted another campground that also had an onsite Kraft brewery (darn it..!!)

Driving the highway towards Grants/Milan we were surprised to be driving through a lava field…well actually a magma field…it’s an astonishing landscape….it looks so recent and hard to imagine how long ago this actually occurred..

The drive down to the Bandera Crater takes you across El Malpais National Monument. It’s an extraordinary landscape…we had no idea that it existed until we were driving through it. A bit of investigation revealed that the first flow is about 10,000 years old and the most recent….3,000 years old. It is astonishing to see the wrinkles and bubbles of magma that looks like it might have happened last year……

Bandera promised a walk to the volcanic rim (it was a very warm for a walk on black lava rock…… 33 Celsius./91F….!!)… and a descent to a frozen cave.

Although not a challenging walk…… it is an extraordinary display of all the varied volcanic features from lave tubes to tree holes…..

A wide variety of plants were clinging to life in this very severe black basalt.

It’s a fairly short walk up to the crater itself with an easy wide trail of crushed basalt.

….and then down the other side to find the path to the caves…..

You have to get all the way to the steps before you see them…..

….and the descent…. not that far but you can really feel the temperature drop as you go down….

Another extraordinary sight/experience….amazing mother earth…..

The visitor centre is another great experience……quite….rustic….and not in the trendy, but very genuine, sense of the word…great little place…..

Next stop was the trailhead for El Calderone……a hike that we had scoped out and planned to follow the next day. The El Malpais area was used by the American military for munitions testing and training in the second world war, Consequently there are warnings about finding old ordnance in the area…. 😮

A trip to the visitor centre for this National Parks gave us another idea tho.

We found the information for a bat outflight which occurs from the larger volcanic caves in this area.( As ever in the US National Parks, the Rangers were super friendly and helpful.) How could we resist….. The planned Ranger led trip ended up being cancelled due to heavy rain that night (bats don’t fly when they are wet..!!) …but we were able to return the next night to the same spot.

We were joined by a group of Boy Scouts and their leaders who had spotted the activity during a trip they had made to hike the Grand Canyon…so they were weary and dusty but very excited. They were a great group to share this amazing experience with.

We waited for the moments just before dusk…and all of a sudden …the cloud of 3000-4000 bats appeared in the cave mouth, swirled a little and then flew east.

They swirled around us…you could hear them and feel the air movement as they whirled around us…..It was a surprisingly emotional experience…..incredible…the photos definitely don’t do justice to what it’s like….

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