Capulin Volcano National Monument

This is a continuation of our 2017 road trip that I took with my youngest in June and July of that year. The day we drove through 5 states in one day, we stopped at Capulin Volcano National Monument in the late afternoon for a quick day trip of this out of the way national monument. It's a small park, only open during daylight hours, so it's perfect for a quick side trip. 

Usually, when we enter a national park or monument, we usually hit the visitors center first and this part was no exception, but there were a couple of extenuating circumstances to this visit. There was an actual physical geocache located inside the visitors center. Usually, geocaches are not allowed within national park boundaries, because the park service views geocaches as litter, for obvious reasons. However, this one was being maintained by one of the rangers there and so this was one of those special circumstances. I'd found a geocache hidden in the visitors center of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, but this one was a little bit easier to find, because all we had to do was ask the person behind the desk for the geocache and they pulled it out from behind the counter. Cool deal all the way around. After signing the logsheet and dropping a travel bug off in the container, we then headed back to the car and the road which would take us to the rim parking lot.

This particular monument is only open during daylight hours, there is no camping inside the park, so it would only take a couple of hours to tour the entire park. We spent about an hour and a half there, either in the visitors center, or walking the rim trail around the volcano. We opted not to make any hikes after the rim trail mainly because we had had a long day already and still had another hour or so to drive to get to our motel room further down the road.

The rim trail is self guiding with several interpretive signs around the rim giving you insight into why this volcano is here and what happened when it erupted many thousands of years ago. Because it stands out from the surrounding landscape, it offered views of New Mexico in all directions. I'm sure that if we'd been paying attention to details on a couple of the signs, we might have been able to see into Utah to the north, but I don't recall any distinguishing features that stood out.

There were two interesting things that did stand out on that particular walk. The first was the abundance of ladybugs that were in the early stages of getting out of hibernation and into mating mode. They were everywhere and I got a couple of shots of them, but nothing to write home about. Those of you who are still reading at this point are probably wondering, why I chose to put a picture of a damaged bench here instead of a photo of the ladybugs.

Well, this damaged bench was interesting, mainly because the damage was caused by a lightning strike. That, in my estimation, made it the coolest thing we saw up there on the rim that day. The bench actually had its own interpretive sign, so we weren't just guessing about it and we didn't really wonder whether we were in danger of a possible strike since the clouds off in the distance weren't the thunderhead type of clouds.

While up on the rim, we also completed what needed to be done for a virtual cache that was in the park and we would have probably also completed the steps for an earthcache that was there as well, but hadn't read the cache page ahead of time. It was only after we were back down off of the volcano that we realized that the information that we needed was back up on the rim and there wasn't enough time left to get back up there before the park closed, and so we called it a day.

All in all, it was an enjoyable couple of hours we spent in the park, once again marveling at the power of nature. If you're ever in the northeast corner of New Mexico, you might want to consider checking out this little park. It was a mid summer day and we practically had the park all to ourselves.