Geo 1095: May 15, Day 865: Blocky Basaltic Andesite

This is pretty typical of the landscape of the Collier Cone Lava Flow's surface on the Proxy Falls Trail loop. There's not much here for a firm sense of scale, but those vine maples (with the bright fall colors) are probably a bit less to a bit more than person-height. If I was standing in the middle of this photo, most of their foliage would be lower than the top of my head, but a few of the taller stems might be a foot or two over it. When you take that scale into account, you can see what an unpleasant, and, bluntly, treacherous landscape this would be to attempt to cross or do fieldwork upon. If you didn't click through to the research paper I linked yesterday (mostly paywalled, but you can get the gist from the abstract), it's about using LIDAR on this flow to thoroughly map it, and using that data to elucidate how the morphology of the flow was created by its emplacement conditions.

Photo unmodified. October 9, 2014. FlashEarth location.