Remember hiking into a volcano?

Do you know where you were standing four years ago on Monday? You were in the middle of a volcano!

We went on a hike to the Amboy Crater, a famous extinct volcano in the Mojave Desert near the historical Route 66. As you were very young, I took you up into the volcano on my back in a child carrier, and when we got to the middle of the it, I let you out. The picture at above right shows you playing in the cone.

The black rock is called basalt and was lava that flowed out of the cinder cone and hardened. Lava last flowed out of the volcano some 5,000 years ago.

Here's a whole bunch of photos from our hike!

Our hike into an extinct volcano

As I promote my new hiking book, I find myself thinking a lot about all of the great hikes we've gone over the years. One of my favorites is at Amboy Crater, an extinct volcano in California's Mojave Desert, that we hiked in spring 2009. I've got a photo album of it at my Facebook site.

I carried you on my back in a child carrier to and from the volcano (in the photo at upper right, you can see the cone on the right side of the horizon), but once we got inside the cinder cone, I let you out. You had a blast running around the crater floor, which was covered in soft clay and hard black basalt. You'd pick up the basalt rocks and throw them and look at every bug that moved around.

It was quite a neat thought to think our playground for the afternoon was the center of a volcano that a few thousand years ago had spewed lava for miles around!