7/10/2023 0 Comments Flagstaff cindersIn the 1960s, Flagstaff’s Astrogeology branch of the USGS created a version of the lunar surface here to train astronauts. The lunar craters of Cinder Lake are more discernible today from above. One of the remaining craters at Cinder Lake that were formed through a choreographed explosion to construct a model of the moon's Sea of Tranquility. A few isolated full-grown pine trees poke up from the otherwise denuded black waterless lake of coarse pebbles. It is a remarkably granular and soft surface, like a giant bowl of rough gravelly marbles. Just north of the landfill is Cinder Lake, a flat pan of black ash, where people drive dirt bikes in circles and spirals in an officially sanctioned Off-Highway Vehicle Area. If you take a right after the mound, you will be on Cinder Lake Landfill Road, headed to Cinder Lake Landfill, a contemporary mound of effluvia and ejecta constructed by local residents–this is the main landfill for the city of Flagstaff. Confusingly, around here mounds can be craters, and craters can be mounds, some naturally formed, some created by man’s hand.Ĭontinuing out of town, as Highway 89 curves north, is Old Caves Crater. North a few miles are some pits west of Robinson Crater. A few miles east in Winona, the Darling Pit has similarly eaten up much of Cinder Mountain. At the base of the hill are some of the provisioners of this mountain: AZ Materials Inc., and the Landscape Connection, Inc., Materials and Yard Décor. Cinder Haul Road curves up the hill, much of which is now gone, spread around elsewhere in the state. On the northeast side of town is Sheep Hill, one of several cinder cones in the area that are dug up commercially for the textured rock. The main one is Highway 89, heading east then north out of Flagstaff. There are just a few paved roads into the area. At its base, its constituents are sorted in bins, arranged by color and texture, like unmixed paints on a palette, extracted from a painting in reverse. Sheep Hill is one a few cinder cones in the volcanic field that has been deconstructed to form a sculptural monument to construction. On the east side the border is abrupt, at the canyons of the Little Colorado River, and the Navajo Nation, another place altogether. This is a chaotic land of dirt roads, sand traps, dead-ends, ranches, and right-angle turns, due to abrupt topographic shifts, loose drainage channels, and irregular land ownership, a mix of federal, private, and state lands, in the common checkerboard arrangement of alternating square mile township and range sections. There are dozens of curiously altered landforms here, potential perceptual and interpretive attractions, at a crater-themed landscape discovery park, free and open to the public, for the most part. This remarkable region, known as the San Francisco Volcanic Field, is peppered with hundreds of cinder cones and lava flows, with landscapes that range from the supremely trammeled, to the utterly impassable. While it remains a perpetual construction site for the foreseeable future, and closed to the public, it is not the only transformed crater in the neighborhood. JAMES TURRELL'S RODEN Crater is perhaps the most elaborate, anticipated, and delayed land art project in the nation. Roden Crater, James Turrell's unfinished earthwork, is one of many craters in the area modified by the hands of man.
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