Qualla: El Malpais National Monument

El Malpais National Monument: Introduction

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian W. Schaller, FAL. The Spanish called it El Malpais -- the badlands -- and the name stuck. From above, this stretch of western New Mexico looks like the earth split open and bled black, a vast apron of frozen lava sprawling between sandstone mesas and the distant peak of Mount Taylor. But what the Spanish name fails to capture is the strangeness hiding beneath that tortured surface: caves where ice has persisted for two thousand years, lava tubes sheltering bat colonies and rare ferns found nowhere else west of the Mississippi, and an ancient trail the Acoma and Zuni peoples carved across a hundred miles of razor-sharp basalt to link their distant pueblos. Designated a National Monument in 1987, El Malpais protects one of the youngest and most dramatic volcanic landscapes in the continental United States.

Image: Brian W. Schaller | FAL

El Malpais National Monument: Fire Beneath the Plateau

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA, CC BY 2.0. The lava flows, cinder cones, and volcanic vents of El Malpais belong to the Zuni-Bandera volcanic field, the second largest volcanic field in the Basin and Range Province. Situated on the southeast margin of the Colorado Plateau along the ancient Jemez Lineament, this is a zone ...

Image: Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA | CC BY 2.0

El Malpais National Monument: Ice in the Darkness

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA, CC BY 2.0. Beneath the lava crust lies a hidden world. El Malpais is riddled with lava tubes -- natural tunnels formed when the outer surface of a lava flow solidified while molten rock continued to drain beneath. Some of these tubes trap cold winter air so effectively that ice accumulates ...

Image: Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA | CC BY 2.0

El Malpais National Monument: Life on the Lava

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathunder, Public domain. Despite its forbidding appearance, El Malpais teems with life in unexpected forms. Some of the oldest Rocky Mountain Douglas-firs on Earth grow here, their roots threaded into cracks in the basalt. In 2020, scientists discovered a population of hart's-tongue ferns inside a lava c...

Image: Jonathunder | Public domain

El Malpais National Monument: Trails Through the Badlands

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA, CC BY 2.0. Long before the Spanish arrived, the Acoma and Zuni peoples forged a trail through El Malpais connecting their pueblos a hundred miles apart. It was a remarkable feat of route-finding across some of the most punishing terrain in the Southwest, and the ice-filled caves along the w...

Image: Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA | CC BY 2.0

El Malpais National Monument: The View from Above

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA, CC BY 2.0. From the air, El Malpais is unmistakable: a dark stain of basalt set against the tawny sandstone and red earth of the surrounding desert. The Sandstone Bluffs overlook marks the boundary where ancient sea-floor sediment meets volcanic flow, a collision of geologic ages visible in...

Image: Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA | CC BY 2.0