Dispatches From the Parks: El Malpais National Monument

Only an hour away from the land of Walter White (Albuquerque) is a fascinating natural wonder in El Malpais National Monument. El Malpais is a national park site that preserves a volcanic landscape that you wouldn’t expect to find in New Mexico. I was lucky enough to visit this area last week and had a wonderful time.

My trip started off with a check in at the visitor center. The visitor center is right in the town of Grants, New Mexico and has a basic gift shop, an exhibit that shows you all of the tours (whether they be by car or foot) that you can take through the expansive park, as well as an outdoor patio that expands across the back of the visitor center and showcases some of the stunning views within the park. The park is at a pretty high elevation (over 6000 feet at the visitor center) but with so many valleys in the area it is able to produce some jaw dropping views.

I next made my way to the Sandstone Bluffs Overlook, one of the easiest places to get to from Grants (the biggest town in the area) other than the visitor center. That being said, the last mile or so to the Overlook is on a bumpy, dirt road that had me putting my rental car through the ringer almost immediately. The Overlook was worth it, though, as the dirt road scares away the crowds and you get a good look at the surrounding valleys from one of the higher points in the park. Nearby storms made the views even more interesting during the time while I was there. These storms ended up cutting my visit a little short later on, but early on they added a nice visual twist to the setting.

My next stop was actually not within the park and, therefore, not on my list of things to do originally. However, La Ventana Arch is so eye-catching that I just had to pull over and get a closer look at it. The arch is quite distinctive and hard to miss, and despite not actually being part of the park (it’s a Bureau of Land Management site), El Malpais National Monument land is just right across the road from it. 

My final stop within the park was one of the more remote trails in the park, Lava Falls Trail. If you are going to do anything inside El Malpais, make sure it’s this trail because it’s such a great introduction to the volcanic landscape that encompasses a lot of this park. With intimidating crevasses, desert plant life and volcanic rock all over, there’s an almost out of this world aspect to this trail. Its remoteness also makes walking this hike such a unique experience. I absolutely loved my time here.

At this point I made my way back to La Ventana Arch to explore it more, but the storms that had been hanging out in the distance for so long had made their way into the park. Thus my time in El Malpais National Monument ended, but this is a place I highly recommend visiting. Being just an hour away from Albuquerque, it’s definitely a place that isn’t difficult to get to so go out and visit it.