Ubehebe Crater

Part ofDeath Valley & the Basin Ranges

A half-mile-wide steam-blast crater at the north end of the valley, and one of the youngest volcanoes in the park.

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Duration

Thirty minutes at the rim, or ninety for the full rim loop.

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Admission

Park entrance fee (30 dollars per vehicle, valid seven days). The park is cashless.

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Best Season

October through April; the climb out of the crater is punishing in heat.

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Fun Fact

The explosion that formed the crater threw shattered rock across roughly fifteen square miles, in places to depths of 150 feet.

The Story

Rising magma met groundwater here, the water flashed to steam, and the pressure took the top off the landscape. Ubehebe is a maar, a crater blasted out rather than built up, and at roughly 2,100 years old it is the youngest and largest of about a dozen craters in this small volcanic field. It measures half a mile across and drops around 600 feet, with banded walls where the explosion cut through fanglomerate, old alluvial fan deposits hardened into rock. Debris from the blasts covers some fifteen square miles, which is why the ground around the rim is black and crunching underfoot.

To the Timbisha Shoshone the crater is Tem-pin-tta-Wo'sah, Coyote's burden basket. The name Ubehebe belonged first to a peak twenty-four miles southwest, and how it migrated here nobody has satisfactorily explained.

A rim trail runs about a mile and a half around the edge, with Little Hebe and the older craters visible to the south. You can also walk down into the bowl on loose cinders, which takes ten minutes and is a genuinely serious climb back out in anything warmer than cool weather. The wind at the rim is close to constant and can be strong enough to make the edge unpleasant. From here the road south turns to dirt and runs twenty-seven miles to Racetrack Playa.