Sunset Crater Volcano
— a cinder cone the sunset never left.
Not only on a wall.
“A thousand feet of black cinders with a rim that runs red and orange where iron in the scoria oxidised after the last eruption around 1085. John Wesley Powell gave it the name on a survey ride. The cone itself has been closed to climbing since 1973. The Lava Flow Trail still runs along the foot of the Bonito flow.
Sunset Crater Volcano, 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 cinder cone about 15 miles north of Flagstaff, the youngest vent in the San Francisco Volcanic Field. Its last eruption, dated by tree-ring and paleomagnetic work to around 1085, is the most recent in Arizona. The cone rises roughly a thousand feet above the surrounding ponderosa, with the Bonito and Kana-a lava flows spreading from its base. President Hoover proclaimed the area a national monument in 1930. The road through the monument links south to Flagstaff and north to Wupatki, the pueblos the eruption displaced and then drew back.
The name came from John Wesley Powell, who rode through in 1885 and wrote that the rim looked lit by the late sun. The colour is real chemistry: iron-rich scoria at the summit oxidised in the heat of the final venting and stained the upper cone red and orange, while the lower flanks stayed black. The contrast is sharpest in low light, when the rim holds colour after the slopes have gone dark. Geologists at the U.S. Geological Survey describe the band as a thin layer, only metres deep, sitting on a much larger cone of unaltered cinder.
The cone itself has been closed to climbing since 1973, when the National Park Service found the cinder surface too easily scarred to recover. The visit happens at the base. The Lava Flow Trail is a one-mile loop across the Bonito flow, with squeeze-ups, hornitos, and a short ice cave. The monument and Wupatki share a 35-mile loop drive off U.S. 89, open daily, with a single fee that covers both. Winter snow can close sections of the loop; spring and autumn are the steadier seasons.