Geoscientists discover Ancestral Puebloans survived from ice melt in New Mexico lava tubes

[Warpy]

2. One of the ice caves is open to the public (or was)

along with a semi improved trail up to the Bandero cone. It's an intensely weird experience to walk down the trail on a triple digit day in summer and into a frigid cave with solidly frozen ice.

The ice itself is mixed with ash and covered in algae, so there must have been a great deal of effort put into it to make it potable.

Some of the lava tubes have been found to extend 29 miles from the crater. El Malpais itself is incredibly rough country, dotted with weirdly distorted trees trying to cling to life on lava fields that have seen very little weathering over the last 3,000 years.