June 28, 2021
This post covers two places that at first glance appear to have nothing in common other than that we visited them on the same day: the Valles Caldera National Preserve and Los Alamos. Read through the post and see if you can find the common link.
After our trek through Bandelier National Monument, we headed into the Jemez Mountains to the Valles Caldera National Preserve, which contains one of three supervolcanoes in North America, the other two being Yellowstone and Long Valley (eastern California, the central Sierra Nevada Range). A series of volcanic explosions here a million years ago was 500 times larger than the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980. The resulting caldera is 13.7 miles across and is crisscrossed by streams that give it a lush green hue.
This panoramic camera shot just doesn't do the vastness justice. The valley is ginormous.
