Even for the West, the landscape is striking. Trying to traverse it I am not so much walking as climbing, clambering. Every movement is measured, fraught. The black basalt landscape itself looks anguished, even agonized. Jagged is the best word. Broken as well. The spires, knobs, even the boulders are all angular, sharp-edged. I am fascinated.

Malpaís. We’ve borrowed the word from the Spanish and use it either as “Badlands” or “Bad Country”. I prefer “Bad Country”. Bad Country is a rough topography, nearly impossible to traverse. It is a barren country, nearly impossible to vegetate. It is a relic landscape, seemingly unaffected by the passage of time. It is forged in fire, volcanic. It is widespread across the desert heart of the American West. It is closer than you think.

The drive across the Cascades on Highway 66 is a mere 50 miles, the last run from the Klamath River setting up the great reveal at Keno. And there it is, a different world. The Klamath Basin, so different from anyplace on the western side of the range. However, it is not just the Klamath Basin, it is the northwest corner of the great Basin and Range. I can travel from the Klamath Basin to the Tran-Pecos country of southwest Texas and never leave it.

Geologists are fascinated. The Basin and Range is geologically young and physiographically different from other geologic provinces around it (the Sierra, Cascades, Rockies, Colorado Plateau). With cessation of geologic plate convergence south of Cape Mendicino the interior of the American West has been stretching, thinning. The result is a highly faulted landscape with uplifted mountain blocks such as the Ruby Mountains in Nevada and downdropped valleys like Death Valley in California.

This stretching and thinning brings the molten portion of the Earth’s mantle closer to the surface. Many thousands of faults allow for the molten rock to rise to the surface and create volcanic landforms, including great lava flows on the valley floors: Malpaís.

Three flows, the Devil’s Homestead, Schonchin, and Callahan coat the Lava Beds National Monument landscape. Great black blemishes against a tan background from space, more details emerge when driving through. But, taking the landscape on its own terms, I walk into the frozen forest of the labyrinth.

In the rock forest stories emerge. In a cold, fossil landscape are stories of great, even violent energy, movement, the pangs of birth. There are moments of lassitude as well, of relative quiet, gentle movements, a sort of slow dance. There is meaning, there is even beauty.

Wallace Stegner has said that “the West is less a place than a process”, and “the Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation”. He is paraphrasing the geologist Clarence Dutton when he describes the adaptations necessary to make the West beautiful to us: “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geologic time.

Deep within this rock forest, pondering that scale, visualizing the summit of Telescope Peak from the bottom of Death Valley, the entire 11,309 feet of relief between. I’m pondering scaling, seeing the swirls and eddies trapped in the cooling lava, observed from mere inches. Perhaps the greater challenge is to ponder the range of scales encountered here.

In this beautiful, black, bad country, there are discoveries waiting. This land of frozen rock, liquid fire.