Lava Lands Visitor Center and Lava Butte

Seven thousand years ago, a single eruption split the earth here, sent rivers of basalt west to bury the Deschutes River under more than a hundred feet of lava, and left behind a 5,020-foot cinder cone surrounded by a flow still largely free of vegetation. That cone is Lava Butte. A rim trail circles its crater at the top; a shuttle runs from the Lava Lands Visitor Center below. The visitor center, part of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, exists to explain what you're looking at — and what you're looking at is a landscape that NASA once decided was the closest thing on Earth to the moon.