El Malpais: The Bad Country That Hid Louis L'Amour's Flint RoadyGoat
You're near El Malpais, Spanish for the bad country, the vast lava badlands south and east of Grants, New Mexico. The black rock here is young: the McCartys flow, the last great eruption of the Zuni-Bandera volcanic field, hardened only about three thousand years ago, making it one of the youngest lava flows in the Lower 48. The field hides more than four hundred caves, including lava tubes that run for miles and ice caves that hold frozen water year round, plus kipukas, islands of older ground marooned in the lava. For centuries the Acoma and Zuni peoples crossed it on a foot trail between their pueblos, melting cave ice for water. The badlands also gave Louis L'Amour the setting for his 1960 Western Flint, whose ailing hero rides into the lava to disappear. (Sources: National Park Service; New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources; Wikipedia, El Malpais National Monument; HistoryNet, Louis L'Amour's New Mexico.)
