SUNSET CRATER VOLCANO NATIONAL MONUMENT

SUNSET CRATER FIGURES prominently in the tales of many Native American tribes, including a Hopi origin story. The monument has its own origin story, one that Hilary Clark, an interpretive ranger, finds compelling. In the late 1920s, film crews scouted the volcano as a possible setting for the movie Avalanche, based on a Zane Grey novel. When Museum of Northern Arizona co-founder Harold S. Colton learned the 1,000-foot-tall cinder cone might be dynamited, he galvanized the community in a preservation effort that ended with Sunset Crater’s designation as a national monument. Colton discovered Sinaguan-style pit houses buried beneath the cinders in 1930. The archaeologist was able to more accurately date the eruption by analyzing tree rings at these sites, using a technique that also has local origins. “The science of dendrochronology was discovered in Flagstaff, in 1904, by A.E. Douglass,” Clark says. “So it seems very fitting.”