The Ubehebe craters, big and little

If you like craters, Death Valley has the craters you've been looking for.  The Ubehebe and Little Hebe craters are volcanic, with the large crater being created about 1000 years ago, and the smaller one 300 to 500 years ago (just a baby!).

The landscape around the crater is a wide valley with these tumbleweed-like plants (or maybe they are tumbleweeds, I am not much of an expert on desert plants).

The road curves and heads towards the crater up ahead...

You arrive at the parking lot, and wow!  This is one big crater!

There's a trail to hike around it, so off we go, that is me on the trail.  We took the wrong route by mistake and ended up on a very skinny and scary ridge, but we made it.

This is looking down the eroded ridges of the outside of the crater:

This piece is kind of an offshoot to the main crater which is to the left out of the frame, maybe there was a more minor explosion here:

See, that's the trail we should have taken that cuts across the main crater and the offshoot.

Now we are looking into the Little Hebe crater, we hiked around this one too, it is just a bit beyond that other crater offshoot.

You get a much better view of it from further along the trail, this is it:

Back to the main crater, you can see it was the end of the day, the shadows are rapidly filling it:

These next two are just of the landscape around the crater:

Crater rim with the mountains in the background:

A look at the eroded crater sides, now in shadow:

It's a long trail!  It took us a couple of hours to hike the loop around both craters.

This shows the pathway down into the crater, we are going to take that too:

This is me again on the last leg of the trail, coming up to the path that goes down into the crater:

Starting to descend...

That's me down at the bottom, can you see me?  Ed took this and he is at least 3/4 of the way there himself, it is very deep and big, it's around 450 feet deep, and the trail that descends is around 0.3 miles long.

This is the mud floor of the crater, I liked the patterns.

So that was it for December 11, with more fun stuff to come the next day ...