Happy Travel Tuesday - Grants NM

 

  Our last minute trip to Grants, NM was totally pawesome! Grants, NM is a small New Mexico town which, like a LOT of the towns we have visited, started out as a railway camp.  It was also part of the old Route 66 route that Mama likes to visit.

We really thought the pawrents would be looking at trains and visiting old highway signs and we would just be hanging out in CeCe relaxing the whole weekend. Little did we know we would be on the go for most of the trip!  

 

 

 We stayed at the Grants, NM KOA Campground.  Even though is a campground mostly for overnight campers, it was perfect for us. It was mostly empty during the day, making it easier for us to hike without running into other campers!

 

 There was some fun hiking to be done right at our campsite. An actual lava flow ran behind the KOA Campground. They made a nice trail even had signs with descriptions of the different sites to see. Today, we're going to show you some of the fun things we saw(we had Mama put the words on the signs in italic underneath our description).

 

It's hard to explain just how much lava rock ran along(and sometimes in the middle of) the trail. Who thinks of lava and volcanoes, when you think of New Mexico, right? Obviously, the Spanish Explorers didn't when they traveled through the area.

El Malpais

The Spanish explorers called this land El Malpais and it means "the badlands". When the Spanish came through 500 years ago the lava was too rough for their horses and carts. They had to go around the lava. There are five major lava flows

 

 

 If you look all the way at the back of the picture, a little to the left, almost touching the sky, you'll see Mt. Taylor...the volcano that "blew its top"

 

 Mt. Taylor

The distant high peak behind this sign is Mt. Taylor. It is the highest mountain peak in Western New Mexico at 11,300 feet above sea level. The elevation here(at the campsite) is about 6,500 feet. Mt. Taylor is a volcano that was active about one million years ago. It didn't have a lava flow. It just blew its top.

 

There are 15 inactive volcanoes in Cibola County, NM(where Grants is located) along with a lot of lava flows. We suppose sometimes they just had to take an educated guess on which volcano the lava flowed from.

 

 

 

El Calderon Lava Flow

You are looking at a lava flow from 115,000 years ago. All this lava rock may be originated at the El Calderon volcano. When the volcano was active the lava flowed over the ground 25 miles to get here. The lava flow was up to 25 feet deep.

 

 

 

 The pawrents took a ride to see the Bandera Crater AND the ice caves. We'll let Mama share her pictures in a couple of weeks on Nature Friday.

Bandera Crater

The low blue mountain beyond this sign is a volcano called Bandera Crater. It had lava flows thousands of years ago. There are caves in the lava flow that are filled with ice all year round. Bandera Crater and the ice caves are open for tours for a fee. 

 

Here is a video Mama made of our trip down to Grants NM, along with some views from our campground and more hiking moments!

Feel free to watch it HERE at our YouTube Channel too!

 

 

 Thanks for tagging along with us on our little hike through the lava flows!

 

  

We are joining Sandee at Comedy Plus for the 

Happy Tuesday Blog Hop this week!