Capulin Volcano National Monument (Part 1)

Capulin Volcano National Monument protects 793 acres around an extinct cinder cone volcano in the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field of northeastern New Mexico. The monument is located by the community of Capulin, NM but the nearest city is Raton, NM to the west.

This huge volcanic bomb sits outside the Capulin Volcano Visitor Center. A volcanic bomb is a mass of semi-molten rock ejected during an eruption that measures more than 64 mm in diameter.

The Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field is the easternmost Cenozoic (66.4 million years ago to present) volcanic field in the United States. It stretches for nearly 8,000 square miles and contains at least 100 recognizable volcanoes. The field experienced three phases of volcanic activity: the Raton Phase on the western edge of the field about 9-3.6 million years ago, the Clayton Phase on the eastern edge of the field about 3.6-2 million years ago, and the Capulin Phase in between them less than two million years ago. Capulin Volcano was one of the most recent eruptions in the field about 62,000-56,000 years ago. The Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field is currently dormant with no activity in the last 30,000-40,000 years.

Left to right are Mesa Larga, Green Mountain, and Jose Butte. On a clear day, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains would be visible on the horizon.

Left to right are Palo Blanco Mountain, Horseshoe Crater, the Pine Buttes, Laughlin Peak, and Melon Mesa.

Volcano Road spirals around Capulin Volcano up to a parking lot at the rim. Cinder cones like Capulin Volcano form during eruptions where lava is blasted into the air, breaks into small pieces, and solidifies as volcanic bombs, cinders, and ash that accumulate around the vent as a cone. In some cases, eruptions also occur from vents at the base of the cinder cone called the boca, Spanish for “mouth.” Cinder cone eruptions end as magmatic gases are exhausted, lessening the pressure to eject lava.

Before and during the initial eruption, the first lava flow moved east from the base of Capulin Volcano. Three other lava flows emerged from the boca, spreading southeast (second flow), southwest (third flow), and north (fourth flow). Lava tubes that aided movement of the flows later collapsed. Small dome-shaped features called tumuli or squeeze-ups formed where pressure within inflating lava flows broke through solidified lava crust. The lava flows cover 15.7 square miles, most of which lies outside the boundaries of the monument.

Capulin Volcano rises over 1,300 feet above the surrounding plains to an elevation of 8,182 feet above sea level. The base of the volcano is four miles in circumference, the rim of the crater is 1450 feet in circumference, and the crater about 415 feet deep. Scientists estimate that the volcano has lost around 100 feet of elevation since its formation due to erosion. On a clear day, parts of four states can be seen from the highest point of the volcano, including mountains in Colorado, volcanoes in New Mexico, Black Mesa in Oklahoma, and land beyond Rabbit Ear Mountain in Texas.

Capulin Volcano lies within an ecotone, or environmental transition zone, where the shortgrass prairie at the western limit of the Great Plains meets the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Range of the Rocky Mountains. The name of the volcano comes from the word capulín, which is Spanish for chokecherry (Prunus virginiana), a shrub that grows throughout the monument.

About 10 miles southeast of Capulin stands Sierra Grande, the largest volcano in the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field. Sierra Grande is an extinct shield volcano that rises 2,200 feet above the surrounding plains. Shield volcanoes are broad gently sloping mountains formed from multiple eruptions of fluid lava flows. In the foreground below are pressure ridges, which are wavy marks on the lava surface that formed perpendicular to the direction of the flow.

Paleoindians of the Folsom tradition hunted ancient bison (Bison Antiquus) in this area as early as 10,000 years ago. The first Folsom projectile points ever discovered were found eight miles from Capulin Volcano near Folsom, NM. In more recent history, the Comanche, Ute, and Jicarilla Apache hunted in this area and used it as part of a trade route that connected the Plains peoples with the Puebloans.

Following the arrival of the Spanish in 1541, explorers Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and Juan de Padilla camped a mile west of Capulin Volcano in search of the fabled seven cities of gold. In 1706, Juan de Ulibarri led a group of 40 soldiers across New Mexico and into Colorado in pursuit of Picuri Native Americans. Along the way, they became the first non-indigenous people to explore the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field.

In 1821, Mexico gained independence from Spain and lifted trade barriers with the United States. William Becknell immediately led a small party west from Franklin, MO along old indigenous routes to trade and sell goods in Santa Fe, NM, establishing the Santa Fe Trail. Many other traders soon followed along various routes of the trail. The onset of the Mexican-American War in 1846 saw the United States use the Santa Fe Trail to quickly transport soldiers and supplies to New Mexico. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war and annexed New Mexico as a U.S. territory. Military forts were established along the Santa Fe Trail to protect local residents and travelers against conflicts with Native Americans.

A food shortage at Fort Sumner in the 1860s led to the War Department advertising high prices for cattle. In 1866, Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving established the Goodnight-Loving Trail from Belknap, TX to Cheyenne, WY to tap the markets for longhorn cattle. The trail passed directly by Capulin Volcano and quickly attracted other cattlemen. In 1867, Henry McCarty, aka “Billy the Kid," climbed the volcano while assisting Candido and Andres Archuleta transport 1,800 longhorn cattle from Taos to the Goodnight-Loving Trail.

Lichens are symbiotic partnerships between fungi and algae or cyanobacteria. The fungus creates a thallus, or body, that houses both organisms and the alga or cyanobacterium shares food produced through photosynthesis. Many lichens exude acids that slowly break down rocks into soil and allow vegetation to take root.

 By 1873, the western expansion of railroads led to the construction of the Granada-Fort Union Military Route to better supply Fort Union. Traffic along the Santa Fe Trail shifted to this new road which passed directly southeast of Capulin Volcano. Travel along the Santa Fe Trail largely ended after the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad reached Lamy near Santa Fe in 1879.

As people migrated west in the late-1800s, they brought industries of resource exploitation and early cinder mining left a large pit at the base of Capulin Volcano. In 1891, Capulin Volcano was declared one of the “most perfect specimens of extinct volcanoes in North America” and the General Land Office withdrew it from "settlement, entry or other disposition under any of the public land laws until such time as Congress may see fit."

Ernest Thompson Seton moved to northeastern New Mexico in 1893 to work as a naturalist and animal trapper and later published many books detailing his experiences. Among them was his hunt of Lobo, an enormous Mexican gray wolf that led a pack of five wolves in killing 2,000 cattle over five years in the prairie surrounding Capulin Volcano, Sierra Grande, and the Currumpaw Creek. After significant effort, Seton eventually killed Lobo but later wrote "Ever since Lobo, my sincerest wish has been to impress upon people that each of our native wild creatures is in itself a precious heritage that we have no right to destroy or put beyond the reach of our children." Seton would become one of the founding pioneers of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.