Sunset Crater

BY: Joseph Stocker

It was as though nature had gone on a debauch-a wild, orgiastic lost weekend.

The earth shook with fearsome violence. Then, suddenly. the barren plateau burst open and a column of black smoke and dust began to climb toward the sky.

The column swelled and became a massive cloud, shot through with weird streaks of flame as red hot rocks exploded from the aperture in the earth's surface. The air was rent with grotesque noises, and a black rain of ash commenced to fall, laying a heavy, stygian mantle over the countryside. Bean-sized cinders beat down like ebony hail. Day turned to night.

Where nothing had been before, a mountain began to form. Slowly it rose and spread-a hundred feet high, then another hundred feet, and another, and another, until finally there it stood, bulging up a thousand feet above the tableland around it, a mountain with a hole in the top.

This was Sunset Crater in the making, a creature of earth's ferocity, born in volcanic convulsion.

It stands today as one of the most enthralling of Arizona's natural marvels-16 miles northeast of Flagstaff and four miles east of U. S. Highway 89. Each year thousands of motorists visit the phenomenon which President Hoover in 1930 designated as one of the state's 16 national monuments.

Sunset Crater is unique, not only by the mere fact of the eruption which brought it into being, but also by the fact that it is the only prehistoric eruption in America which science has dated accurately.

Archeologists have fixed the date at about 885 A.D. They accomplished this by studying tree rings in the roof and wall timbers of the nearby pit-houses in which dwelled the Indians of that day.

For this was populated area, though not heavily populated, since the land was poor and yielded but a scanty livelihood. Here lived a scattering of the so-called Mogollon and Patayan Indian groups, cultivating maize and building earth lodges.

Volcanic cinders and lava beds around Sunset Crater in northern Arizona are eloquent reminders of the cataclysmic forces of Nature. Here are evidences of the most recent activity in San Francisco Peaks volcanic field. There were other eruptions.

Road to Sunset Crater, a national monument, passes through lava beds, formed nine hundred years ago. In places the lava flowed twenty miles from the point of eruption. Marks of prehistoric civilization are found under and above the cinders.

Of the two separate lava flows Bonito Flow is the largest and the best defined. Kana-a Flow, east of Sunset Crater, is less distinct. To haul away the material ejected from Sunset Crater would require a freight train at least 163,000 miles in length.

Of all the four hundred craters and vents known in the Flagstaff area, Sunset Crater alone has been enshrined by Hopi Indians. Friendly dieties of the Hopis reside here. The wind-moulded cinder heaps in the area add a strange note to the wide landscape.

"BONITO LAVA FLOW" MOLTEN MATERIAL ESCAPING FROM VENTS IN THE OLDER LAVA COULD NOT FLOW FAR IN THIS INTERCONE BASIN WHICH HAS THEREFORE BEEN FILLED HD TO DEOTUS OF SEVEDA UNDER FEFT TO FORM THIS RECENT LAVA FLOW. ITS MARGINS MAY BE TRACED FOR SOME DISTANCE NORTHWEST OF SUNSET CRATER, Knowing of the havoc wrought by the relatively recent eruption of Mexico's Paricutin, and remembering the destruction of Pompeii, one can imagine what terror must have gripped these simple Indian folk at witnessing the furious birth of Sunset Crater. Truly it must have seemed to them that this fiery upheaval meant the end of life and of all things. But that didn't come to pass. Instead a strange thing happened.

In the months after the violence had subsided, vegetation began to grow lush in the black volcanic sand. Grass sprouted up through the earth's jet cloak and thickened into green carpets. Pine trees took root. What had been bleak plateau, poorly productive at best, was transformed into a region of amazing fertility.

The reason was soon evident. Rain water, which hitherto had poured off the land and tumbled in floods down the canyons, now was trapped and held by the sand layer.

Swiftly the word spread. Beneficient gods had worked flaming magic and created a wondrous garden where there had been only desert.

There ensued a land rush which must have borne a curious resemblance to that famous rush of modern history-Oklahoma's Run of '89. Presently the land was teeming with people-some 4,000 of them, living in their pit-houses and tilling the strange black soil.

But then, even as now, men destroyed the good things which the earth had given them. Their ceaseless cultivation of the black sand cover brought the fine ash particles up to the surface. Then the wind came and blew the fine sand cover into dunes-the same sand cover which held the moisture in the soil.

In some places the black sand was too deep for growing plants to reach the surface. Elsewhere it blew away entirely. destroying the mulch.

Friction and discontent arose among the people. Families seeking defense against their neighbors built large masonry apartment houses of the pueblo type, and the ruins of one of them, known today as Wupatki, can still be found 13 miles northeast of Sunset. But these pueblos were a death trap as well as a defense, for sanitary conditions were abominable and many children died.

Then the drouth came. The people, their good earth having turned bad, began to move away. Soon there was nobody left, and the mountain with a hole in the top looked down upon naught but a black and desolate wasteland.

This, then, is the story which scientists have reconstructed of the birth of Sunset Crater and of the era of human development which in turn it fathered-an era come full circle.

The crater derives its name from its extraordinary coloring -bright yellow at the crest, blending then into various shades of orange and red and, finally, the black of its skirt.

At the summit is a pit 1,300 feet wide and 400 feet deep. and there is a path to the top which a visitor can negotiate in a one-hour round trip. From the lip of the crater one may view the incomparable Painted Desert and lofty San Francisco Peaks.One student of Sunset Crater has observed that the im-portance of the crater in Hopi ritual "may indicate the last vestiges of some devious group memory of events which occurred there." Perhaps deep within these modern-day Indians there stirs a faint echoing of those epochal events of 1,100 years ago of the time when the earth opened up and belched flame, and the black rain came.