Sunset Crater cinder cone
— — a thousand feet of black cinder, the rim still red.
Not only on a wall.
“The youngest volcano in Arizona — a thousand-foot cinder cone north of Flagstaff that built itself in a single eruption around the year 1085. The cone is jet-black at the base and oxidized rust-red along the rim, where John Wesley Powell named it Sunset Crater in 1885. It is the centerpiece of Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, set aside in 1930. The Bonito Lava Flow at its foot still looks fresh, eight centuries on.
Sunset Crater cinder cone, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Sunset Crater is a roughly 1,000-foot-tall cinder cone in the San Francisco Volcanic Field about 15 miles north of Flagstaff, rising to a summit of 8,042 feet. It is the youngest volcano in Arizona, built in a single eruption that geologists date to around 1085 CE — recent enough that ancestral Puebloan communities in the area witnessed the eruption and adapted to it. The cone and the surrounding Bonito Lava Flow are protected within Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, established by President Herbert Hoover in 1930.
The colour is what gives the crater its name. Most of the cone is loose black basaltic cinder, but the upper rim is stained rust-orange and red by oxidized iron-rich tephra and by sulfur and gypsum deposited late in the eruption. John Wesley Powell, surveying northern Arizona in 1885, called the cone Sunset Mountain because the rim looks lit from within at dusk even when the rest of the volcano has gone dark. The Bonito Lava Flow that pooled at the cone's foot covers about 1.8 square miles.
The monument is reached from US 89 north of Flagstaff and shares a single 35-mile loop road with Wupatki National Monument to the north. Climbing the cone itself has been prohibited since 1973 to protect the loose cinder slope; the Lava Flow Trail at the base, about a mile long, gets visitors close to the spatter ramparts and squeeze-ups of the Bonito flow. The visitor center is open year-round, with an entry fee covering both monuments. Snow closes the higher overlooks in midwinter.