Forty million years ago, the Cascades began pulling themselves out of the earth, and they haven't stopped. The range that rose here created a rain shield that left everything to its east dry and open. Seven thousand years ago, a single eruption buried the Deschutes River under more than a hundred feet of basalt and left behind Lava Butte's cinder cone, still largely bare. Eighty thousand years ago, a lava river drained its own tunnel and left a mile-long corridor underground, holding at 42 degrees to this day. Thirteen hundred years ago, obsidian poured liquid from a magma chamber two to four miles down — the youngest lava flow in Oregon, and the same material Native Americans had already been working into tools for generations. This landscape wasn't backdrop. It was instruction. The river, the cave, the black glass underfoot — all of it still here, still legible, for anyone willing to read it.
