Valles Caldera

A friend went to Los Alamos today, and to the Jemez Springs, which are in, ironically, the Jemez Mountains, and Valles Caldera National Preserve. He brought back some really cool pieces of bark for me. They're just awesome! They are flat, and smooth, and are in strange shapes. Some of them are charred on one side from the fires. I love them, and they are probably going to go into some strange art project of mine.

The Jemez Mountains are a volcanic field in the northern part of New Mexico, and they overlies the west edge of the Rio Grande rift.

The most recent volcanic activity was roughly 130,000 years ago. The volcanic field surrounded by the mountains is best known for the Valles caldera which formed roughly 1.12 million years ago and produced the Bandelier Tuff. The Caldera is beautiful. Valles Caldera, basically, is a 90,000-acre volcanic bowl. You can see old logging roads corkscrew out of it, one road after the other. The Federal Government bought the land in 2000 for $100 million. It is currently part of the National Forest Service, but not run by the National Forest Service, nor subject to National Forest Regulations.

The Caldera harbors Soda Dam, which is a travertine deposit. Travertine is finely crystalized limestone which was formed by the calcium carbonate within water. It is a deposit for the hot springs. The most recent deposit was 5,000 years ago, and the oldest is 1 million years ago. The dam runs close to a faultline, and the deposits get thicker along the fault. Because it is a deposit for the hot springs, the hot springs will flow through, to disolve the minerals, and transport them through underwater channels, to the end, where it creats the formations. With Soda Damn being formed by sulfur-rich heated magma underground, the formation required thousands of years to develop.