Saturday, August 21, 2010

...fire and ice...


...after leaving Flagstaff, we headed toward Albuquerque...by the time we got to Grants, New Mexico, we were ready to stop...we know when to stop because someone begins to get cranky...he he...we were there for two nights...two very interesting sites we would have missed had we not stopped there...did you know only twenty miles from Grants there is a cave with ice and a volcano within a two mile hike...unbelievable....of course, we had to check it out...right there on the continental divide among the Ponderosa Pines at an elevation of 8,000 ft an ancient lava trail leads to a collapsed lava tube...inside this tube is an ice cave...the temperature never rises above 31 degrees...as soon as you reach a certain level, the temperature drops...amazing...the floor of the ice is approximately 20 ft deep...it dates back 3400 years...there is a green tint caused by an Arctic algae...the ancient Indians and early settlers mined the ice, but in 1946 the ice removal was stopped...


...just a two mile hike from the ice cave was the Bandera Crater...it rose in volcanic fury some 10,000 years ago...it is approximately 1,200 feet across and 800 feet deep... the lava trail was some 30 miles and could be seen on both sides of I-40...we were glad we stopped in Grants....
..twisted trees and roots were everywhere...

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