Newberry Crater Lava Lands
— — a volcano still warm under the pines.
Not only on a wall.
“A shield volcano the size of Rhode Island, hiding in plain sight off Highway 97. The caldera holds two lakes, Paulina and East, with a wall of black obsidian between them that catches the afternoon sun like broken glass. The Lava Lands side, down at the base of Lava Butte, is the part most travellers see first. A cinder cone, a paved road to the rim, and a thousand acres of basalt that still looks freshly poured.
Newberry Crater Lava Lands, 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.
Newberry Volcano is one of the largest shield volcanoes in the contiguous United States, covering about 1,200 square miles of central Oregon. The summit caldera sits at roughly 6,385 feet and cradles Paulina Lake and East Lake, separated by a young rhyolitic flow. The Lava Lands Visitor Center, run by the Deschutes National Forest, anchors the northern end of the monument near the cinder cone of Lava Butte. The Big Obsidian Flow inside the caldera erupted about 1,300 years ago, making it the youngest lava flow in Oregon.
The Big Obsidian Flow is the signature texture of Newberry: a 1.1-square-mile field of black volcanic glass and pumice that postdates the last major caldera-forming event. A one-mile interpretive loop climbs onto the flow itself, where the obsidian breaks with conchoidal edges sharp enough that Indigenous Klamath and Northern Paiute knappers traded the stone across the Columbia Plateau for thousands of years. Down at Lava Lands, the basalt is older and rougher, an aa flow from Lava Butte that congealed about 7,000 years ago into the dark plain you walk across to reach the cone.
The Lava Lands Visitor Center sits about 13 miles south of Bend on US Highway 97 and opens seasonally, typically May through October. A narrow paved road climbs to the rim of Lava Butte; in peak season the Forest Service runs a shuttle and caps cars at the top. The caldera itself is reached by Paulina Lake Road from Highway 97, a 13-mile climb that closes to vehicles in winter. A Northwest Forest Pass or day fee covers entry, and the Big Obsidian Flow trailhead is the most-walked stop inside the caldera.