Getaways: Lava Beds National Monument, a peaceful place linked to a bloody war

Follow a half a million years of volcanic activity with 12 centuries of human habitation and you’ll get California’s Lava Beds National Monument.

Located in the state’s remote northeastern corner and close to the Oregon border, Lava Beds is a place of stunning contradiction. It’s at once Dante’s Inferno and a slice of heaven, seemingly desolate yet teeming with life, a high and arid desert bound by fertile lakes and rich marshes. Though unusually quiet and peaceful, it’s best remembered for a long and bloody war between resident Modocs and the U. S. Cavalry.

The primary cause of all this splendor and desolation is nearby Medicine Lake volcano, which has been dozing for the past 1,000 years or so. That’s a mere blink of time, geologically speaking, but long enough for nature to have transformed the shallow basin at the volcano’s summit into a 640-acre lake bordered by graceful pines. In fact, much of the surrounding mountainous terrain - lava in origin - is heavily forested, dotted with streams and small lakes.

Fifteen miles distant, however, the hills descend, ending abruptly in a dry, flat and broad valley filled with deep craters, smooth cindercones and fields of hard black rock. This is Lava Beds National Monument, and though it appears at first glance to be utterly uninhabitable, it actually supports a wide diversity of plant and animal life.

More surprising, Lava Beds offers activities that include a hike through what is surely the nation’s most unusual battlefield. You can also visit a cliff wall emblazoned with thousands of ancient petroglyphs, explore underground lava tubes and observe thousands of birds during their yearly spring or fall migration.

The first people to settle the area, perhaps hunters in pursuit of game, arrived nearly 12,000 years ago, but almost nothing is known about them. Their eventual successors, the Modocs, settled along the shores of nearby Tule Lake and beside the Monument’s present-day Indian Well Cave. They built domed dwellings from reeds and feasted on fish, waterfowl, game, edible bulbs and seeds.

This pleasant existence ended soon after European settlers began arriving in the mid-19th century, claiming Modoc grounds for themselves. Uprooted from their land, the Modocs were moved against their will to a reservation in Oregon and forced to live with their traditional enemies, the Klamaths. Eventually they rebelled, left the reservation and returned to the Lava Beds.

In November 1872, troops arrived from Fort Klamath to remove the Modocs once again. Fighting broke out and the troops set the village afire. The Modocs fled, taking refuge in the nearby lava fields with their twisted black cliffs, deep clefts and fissures, jagged boulders, shallow caves, and narrow trenches - an uncomfortable terrain that offered invisibility, a tremendous tactical advantage. From within their lava fortress, the Modocs could move about without being seen and fire on the soldiers who were totally exposed on the flat valley floor.

For the next eight months, under the leadership of Kientpoos, known popularly as Captain Jack, 160 Modoc men, women and children defended their stronghold against more than 1,000 U.S. Cavalry soldiers. They survived the winter, but they surrendered in June, half-starved and broken in spirit. Captain Jack was hanged in October, almost a year after the Modoc War began.

Today a walk through the battlefield, known as Captain Jack’s Stronghold, is a unique experience. Trail markers clue visitors to important highlights of the long siege: a steep spot where the shaman’s medicine flags hung, protecting the tribe with magical powers; the craggy rock that served as Captain Jack’s command post; the knoll that doubled as a speaker’s platform during war councils.

If you visit during summer, it’s best to tour the Stronghold in the cool of morning. Later, when the day grows too warm for hiking, you can cool off by traveling underground to tour the Monument’s most intriguing geological feature, lava tubes.

The tubes are formed when lava is about 1,800°F and rapidly running. The surface, exposed to far cooler air temperatures, slows and hardens, but the inner flow continues on its course. Eventually, when the volcano stops erupting, the flow drains off and a tunnel, or tube, is left beneath the hardened outer shell. Tubes tend to be long and narrow but occasionally broaden out; they resemble, and are often called, caves.

The Monument contains hundreds of lava tubes, and they’re all different. A few hold ancient rock paintings, or pictographs. Some have icy floors. You can walk comfortably through many, but others are so small you must slither and crawl. A number have interconnecting branches or different levels. Most are in their natural state - that is, unimproved - but some have had ladders installed to enable easier access.

Nothing on earth is quite so dark as the interior of a deep cave (cave fish evolved with no eyes because they simply didn’t need them). Nothing is quite so silent, either. To experience it, find a secure seat far from the light at the cave entrance and turn off your flashlight. You’ll find the silence absolute, the total blackness unchanging. If you sit long enough you’ll begin to lose your bearings, like a pilot with a busted gyroscope adrift in the fog.

Turn your light back on and, as you continue to walk along, examine the variety of shapes and textures created by the lava’s movement: dripping stalactites, shelves, ribbing, cauliflower, webs, pillars, bridges, and ropes. It’s hard to believe that everything you see was originally fluid and that molten lava once oozed merrily along where you stand.

After exhausting your curiosity about the battlefield and lava tubes, there’s still much to do. If you’re an art lover, journey to Petroglyph Point. A steep, sheer bluff near the northeast entrance, it hosts the majority of the monument’s more than 5,000 ancient rock engravings (it’s also a nesting site for owls, red-tailed hawks and cliff swallows). Most of the petroglyphs here are believed to be 400-1,500 years old, but some may date back 6,000 years.

Birders who make the 17-mile trek to 39,000-acre Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, a major staging area for migrating waterfowl, can enjoy the 10-mile interpretive auto route, with excellent viewing platforms. More than 250 bird species have been observed here, including the endangered Lost River and Shortnose Suckers, White-faced Ibis, Tundra Swan, Bald and Golden Eagles and Greater White-fronted Geese. Peak times for viewing are in spring and fall migrations, when birds number in the hundreds of thousands.

Hiking trails abound at Lava Beds, and many are highly unusual. Walk across a solid acre of lava, and you’ll think you’re on the moon. Or climb 5,300-foot Schonchin Butte. Observed from the west it looks like a huge mountain of smooth lava, which it is. On the east side, however, the butte is forested, and in spring and summer it’s covered with wildflowers.

At the top you’ll find a fire lookout with a shaded porch. Pause here to rest and survey the broad, flat valley encircled by distant violet hills. On a clear day - and most of them are - you’ll see more than 100 miles distant.

As dusk falls, the clear day becomes a star-gazer’s delight. Far from city lights, the skies here read like a high-quality map of the heavens. The Milky Way stands out so crisp and sharp that it’s easy to understand why some Native American tribes thought of it as heaven’s backbone.

It will be quiet while you sleep. The Monument’s campground, though small, is rarely filled. Truly off the beaten track - it’s not on the way to anywhere else - Lava Beds welcomes a steady stream of visitors but remains free of thundering hordes and tour buses. There are, thankfully, no T-shirt or frozen yogurt shops. No food, ice or gasoline, either, so plan ahead.

It’s worth it. If you crave an old-fashioned outdoor experience in a place of great natural and unusual beauty, you’ll love Lava Beds. The reward for your journey will be absolute quiet, much to do and a midnight sky just blazing with stars.

Suzie Rodriguez is a ?Sonoma-based travel writer.