El Malpais National Monument in northwestern New Mexico, USA, is a land of frozen fire – a vast volcanic landscape shaped by violent eruptions and molten magma.

One of the most impressive and accessible relics of this turbulent past is the Bandera Volcano and Ice Cave, where visitors can trace ancient volcanic lava trails before heading below ground into a frozen lava tube cave. 

The volcano last erupted around 10,000 years ago, producing a classic cinder cone and a long, snaking lava flow that is still clearly visible from above. The cone measures roughly 1,400 feet across at the rim and drops 800 feet to the crater floor. During its final eruption, the southern side of the cone collapsed, allowing the lava to drain into the surrounding valley, with a 23-mile river of fire forming a lava tube under the surface.

Visitors can access the crater by following a half‑mile trail that climbs through a juniper, fir and ponderosa pine woodland. This leads to a viewpoint high on the breached side of the cone, where you can look down into the dormant crater, with its walls of cinder and basalt.

From here, another trail leads down to the ice cave, inside a collapsed section of the same lava tube. Hidden from the sun, the cave remains below freezing throughout the year, which has allowed a thick layer of ice, about 20 feet deep, to accumulate over more than 3,400 years.

The shape of the cave’s entrance traps cold air, while snowmelt and rainwater seep through the porous lava and freeze on the cave floor. From a viewing platform, the reflected rays of sunlight illuminate the blue‑green algae trapped below the surface of the ice.

The cave has been a sacred site for more than a thousand years, beginning with the Ancestral Puebloans – an ancient Native American culture (formerly known as Anasazi) that thrived in this area – and continuing as a place of pilgrimage for the visitors who come to see this natural curiosity today.

Despite its inhospitable landscape, El Malpais, translated as ‘the badlands’, supports a wide range of wildlife adapted to the high‑elevation desert environment. Over 190 bird species can be found here, including raptors such as red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, peregrine falcons and great horned owls, while the mammals include black bears, elk, coyotes and 12 species of bat.

On warmer days, you might catch a glimpse of one of the area’s iconic reptiles. These include bullsnakes that mimic rattlesnakes, horned lizards that can double their size in self-defence, venomous Western Diamondback rattlesnakes and collared lizards that emerge to bask in the afternoon sun. There’s also the canyon tree frog, a small, rough-skinned frog that relies on tinajas – temporary pockets of water in bedrock depressions that fill with summer monsoon rains – to lay their eggs.

Beyond El Malpais’ frozen lava flows, the park’s habitats include ponderosa pine forests and sandstone bluffs, while notable plants include prickly pear cacti and the rare Cinder phacelia. This specially adapted plant only grows on exposed volcanic cinder slopes in Arizona and New Mexico, with purple flowers that appear from late summer through autumn.