El Malpais National Monument
National Monument · Grants, New Mexico
El Malpais means the badlands, and the Spanish meant it as a complaint. The monument covers a lava field built by eruptions over the last 60,000 years, the youngest flow only about 3,000 years old, which is recent enough that it is still black and sharp and barely vegetated. Under it runs one of the longest lava tube systems in North America, around seventeen miles of it, where air sinks in and freezes: several of the caves hold permanent ice even in August. Four of them are open to the public with a free permit, and caving here means helmets, three light sources and a decontamination check for white-nose syndrome rather than a paved walkway. Above ground there are cinder cones, a 500-year-old Ancestral Puebloan trail across the flow, La Ventana natural arch and Sandstone Bluffs Overlook, which gives the whole black expanse in one view for no effort at all. Two visitor centres serve the monument from opposite sides of the flow, and the cave permits come from either of them.
1900 East Santa Fe Avenue, Grants, New Mexico, 87020, United States
Park open 24 hours. Visitor center open 9 AM - 5 PM.
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