Into the Volcanic Heart: Craters of the Moon National Monument
January 6, 2021
Inferno Cone Trail is a short, steep hike up a giant cinder cone at the center of the Crater of the Moon National Monument. This 6,181-foot summit provides a panoramic view of the surrounding volcanic landscape leaving you to imagine the molten lava flows oozing over the sagebrush. The view of the Great Rift, the vast volcanic area to the east, is nothing less than killer from the top.
What is a cinder cone you may ask:
Cinder cones form when gas-rich volcanic froth erupts high into the air and then piles in a mound.
The trippiest part of this hike is that you are walking on the settled fragments of a massive volcanic explosion that occur within the oral timeline of the Shoshone people. From the base, you will imagine a crater at the summit of the cone, but this has been buried by millennia of wind-swept cinders.
But we wanted to see a big crater, so we hit the North Crater Trail on an incredibly windy evening (so windy that Vida could not hear Radd’s various captivating musings). The trail passed four craters of various sizes, lava flows, cinder cones, a lava cave, and a group of spatter cones.
The trail ascended the ashen slopes on the north side of the peak, past lava fields to the northwest then climbed a little more to the edge of a satellite crater, and then we came up to the second, larger vent. The stretch of trail along the western rim of the crater was spectacular.
