It dawned on me that though this is my fourth week here, I haven’t shared much about the park itself. In 1890, inspector WD Harland of the General Land Office visited Capulin. After his visitation, he recommended that the volcano and the surrounding area should be removed from public entry, that is, should not be settled. He cited Professor Dana of Yale, then the foremost expert on volcanoes, who described Capulin as “the most perfect specimen of extinct volcanoes in North America.” The Secretary of the Department of the Interior, John Noble agreed, and in 1891, the land was removed from public entry. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a Presidential Proclamation under the Antiquities Act to establish Capulin Mountain National Monument, now Capulin Volcano National Monument.
Capulin Volcano is an extinct cinder cone volcano of the dormant Raton-Clayton volcano field of northeastern New Mexico and southeastern Colorado. A cinder cone volcano is one that only erupts one time, and Capulin erupted somewhere between approximately 50 and 60,000 years ago. Lava shoots up through the ground, leaving a mound of cinder, such as Capulin. Lava flowing out of what are called bocas, vents on the side of the volcano at its base, allowed for Capulin to maintain its rim shape at the top and allows visitors to walk down into the volcano today. The pictures below are of a collapsed lava tube along our Boca Trail, my personal favorite,and of the view inside the volcano.
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