Volcanic
Volcanic rock across the West is geology and, for several nations, holy ground — and the second reading comes first. The San Francisco Peaks, sacred to thirteen tribes, are a live argument over a ski resort making snow from wastewater; Dzil Ligai Si'an, the White Mountain, is a summit the Apache ask you to stop short of; Cave Rock, De'ek Wadapush to the Washoe, was closed to climbers after a long fight to protect it. The forms vary — Sunset Crater is a cinder cone people watched erupt around 1085, Snow Canyon a lava flow poured over red sandstone. Read the rock, but know whose it is.
NM-42
Bandelier National Monument
Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.
Valles Caldera National Preserve
A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.
UT-181
US-20 / Menan-Lorenzo Highway1
US-20/26/931
OR-311
SR-33; N 12000 E road1
ID-341
I-401
US-501
NM-531
US-60 / US-1801
US-642
Capulin Volcano National Monument
A cinder cone you can drive to the top of, rising more than a thousand feet from the high plains east of Raton, whose lava broke out of its foot rather than its crater.
Rio Grande Gorge Bridge
A steel truss strung across a slot in the basalt west of Taos, 565 feet above the river by the careful measure and 650 by the signs, built when the road beyond it did not yet exist.