New Mexico has 114,000 acres of lava fields that look like the surface of another planet

It’s older and wilder than it looks

About 80 miles west of Albuquerque, off Interstate 40, a stretch of western New Mexico looks like the surface of another planet.

El Malpais National Monument covers 114,000 acres of lava fields, cinder cones, underground caves, and sandstone bluffs near the town of Grants.

Spanish explorers named it “el malpais,” which means badlands, because the jagged lava was nearly impossible to cross on foot. It still is, in places.

There’s no entrance fee, and the gates never close.

Walking on lava that’s only 3,000 years old

The McCartys lava flow is one of the youngest volcanic features in the lower 48 states, and you can walk right across it.

The one-mile Lava Falls Trail follows rock cairns over dark basalt, and the ground beneath your feet is only about 3,000 years old. You’ll see pressure ridges, lava toes, and smooth ropy sections called pahoehoe.

In some spots, the lava stacks up 475 feet thick where multiple flows piled on top of each other over thousands of years.

Miles of underground lava tube caves to explore

Beneath the surface, rivers of molten lava once carved out miles of underground passages. When the lava drained away, the tunnels stayed.

You can explore select lava tube caves on your own with a free permit from the visitor center, where rangers also check that you have the right gear and screen for a harmful fungus that could damage the caves.

Bring a helmet, sturdy shoes, and at least two light sources. Some of these tubes hold ice deposits that may be a few thousand years old.

Thousands of bats pour out of a cave at dusk

The El Calderon trail system sits off Highway 53 and packs a lot into an easy loop.

You’ll pass a 300-foot-tall cinder cone that erupted about 60,000 years ago, a lava trench, collapsed sinkholes, and lava tube caves threading under the surface.

The trail winds through ponderosa pine and pinon-juniper growing in the volcanic soil. Come in summer and stay past sunset.

Thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats burst out of Bat Cave at dusk to hunt insects over the lava fields.

Stand on the bluffs and look out over the whole lava field

A short drive on a dirt road off Highway 117 puts you on top of the Sandstone Bluffs Overlook, and the view stretches in every direction.

The lava fields spread below you, Mount Taylor rises to the northeast, the ancient Zuni Mountains sit to the west, and a line of cinder cones runs along the southwest horizon.

In the rock pools on the bluffs, called tinajas, rainwater collects and supports tiny ecosystems, including fairy shrimp and toad tadpoles living in shallow basins carved into the stone.

La Ventana arch rises 125 feet from the canyon floor

La Ventana Natural Arch is one of the largest natural arches in New Mexico, and you can see it from the road before you even park.

A trail of less than half a mile, partly paved, leads from the parking lot up to the base of the arch, and the walk changes everything about the scale of it.

The sandstone cliffs holding the arch in place date back roughly 160 million years to the Jurassic period. Getting up close is worth the short walk.

An ancient trail still marked by Puebloan hand-built cairns

The Zuni-Acoma Trail is one of the oldest paths in the monument, used for at least a thousand years to connect the Zuni and Acoma Pueblos across the lava fields.

The trail runs 7.5 miles one way, and some of the rock cairns marking the route were placed by Ancestral Puebloans hundreds of years ago.

Along the way you’ll cross lava bridges built by hand and may come across ancient pottery fragments in the rock.

The Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, a 3,100-mile route from Mexico to Canada, shares part of this same path.

Falcons, bears, rattlesnakes and more share the lava

The landscape looks barren from the road, but more than 190 bird species live or pass through here, including peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks, and great horned owls.

Black bears, elk, mule deer, mountain lions, and coyotes move through the monument. Rattlesnakes, bullsnakes, horned lizards, and collared lizards warm themselves on the dark lava rock.

The caves serve as roosting and hibernation habitat for multiple bat species. Even Mourning Cloak butterflies and Giant Leopard Moths turn up in the park.

A fern found nowhere else west of the Mississippi

Some of the oldest Douglas-fir trees in the American Southwest grow here, tucked into the monument’s landscape.

In 2020, scientists found a population of hart’s-tongue ferns living inside a lava cave, the first confirmed population of this species west of the Mississippi in the U.S. or Canada.

A flowering plant called cinder phacelia grows only at El Malpais and at Sunset Crater in Arizona, nowhere else.

Moss gardens form at the sunlit entrances of lava caves where ice melt keeps conditions cool and damp year-round.

Some of the darkest night skies in New Mexico

More than two-thirds of the monument falls within proposed wilderness, which means almost no artificial light reaches those areas after dark.

Rangers host stargazing events and meteor shower viewing nights at the visitor center, and several trailhead parking lots stay open specifically for astronomy and night photography.

The monument is working toward official International Dark Sky Park certification.

If you’ve ever driven a long stretch of highway and watched the stars get brighter the farther you get from the city, El Malpais takes that feeling to its logical end.

Two highways frame the monument from opposite sides

No road cuts through the middle of El Malpais, so you approach it from two different directions.

Highway 117 runs along the east side, with sandstone cliffs on one side and dark lava fields stretching toward the horizon on the other.

Highway 53 runs the west edge and leads to the El Calderon area, the lava tube caves, and the Continental Divide Trail.

For something more remote, County Road 42, the Chain of Craters Backcountry Byway, passes through a string of cinder cone volcanoes and requires a high-clearance vehicle.

People have crossed this land for 10,000 years

The Zuni-Bandera volcanic field that shaped El Malpais is the second largest in the Basin and Range Province, and the monument was set aside in 1987 to protect both the volcanic landscape and its cultural history.

People have lived and traveled through this terrain for more than 10,000 years.

The Puebloan peoples of Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and the Ramah Navajo have deep ties to this land and continue traditional uses today.

The monument belongs to that long story, and walking through it, you feel the weight of how much happened here before anyone thought to name it.

Visit El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico

You can pick up a free caving permit at the visitor center at 1900 E. Santa Fe Ave. in Grants, off Exit 85 on Interstate 40. Rangers there check gear and give current trail and cave conditions before you head out.

There’s no entrance fee, and the monument stays open 24 hours a day, year-round. Wear sturdy hiking boots, because the lava rock is sharp and uneven underfoot.

The official website has maps, current conditions, and ranger program schedules.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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