Big Obsidian Flow

Thirteen hundred years ago, this one-square-mile stretch of Newberry Caldera was still liquid — obsidian and pumice erupting from a magma chamber two to four miles down, at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. The youngest lava flow in Oregon left behind a fractured black landscape that Native Americans worked into tools and weapons. Collecting obsidian here is now forbidden. A short interpretive trail loops up and across the flow. Go because the geology is real, and recent, in geologic terms embarrassingly so.