Black Mesa

It seems, wherever you go in this part of the world, you find a Black Mesa. It shouldn’t be surprising, really, when you consider the Rio Grande crosses an oblique line of volcanoes.

There are two in this area. North of town, the ten-mile long finger of land between the Rios Grande and Chama has been called the Black Mesa by geologists since George Wheeler named it so in 1876. Down on the San Ildefonso grant near the road that people use to commute between the valley and Los Alamos there’s another, rising 500' from the surrounding flat lands that slope to the river.

When I first moved here, I was told or read the San Ildefonso mesa was the cap of the Valles Grande volcano that had landed there when it erupted. I’ve also been told it was the last retreat of the pueblo peoples fighting Diego de Vargas in the entrada and that there’s a pair of peregrine falcons nesting there.

Ted Galusha and John Blick resolved the ambiguous naming problem by calling the San Ildefonso mesa the Round Mountain. I prefer to find another name for the peninsula of land, perhaps Wheeler’s Black Mesa or the Chamita Black Mesa.

They also dispelled any romantic notions about its origins.

It’s an independent cinder cone built around a volcanic neck that was formed some 4.4 million years ago in the early Pliocene, possibly as part of the Cerros del Rio volcanic field southeast of the Otowi bridge. According to Daniel Koning, one of its lava flows has been dated to about the time the Rio Grande was becoming a perennial river, long before the Toledo and Valle Grande eruptions.

The base is dark gray to black basalt. The top is covered with river cobbles and pebbles laid down about 1.5 million years ago, long before the lakes described by Steven Reneau and David Dethier.

Cinder cones are the simplest type of volcanos, central vents surrounded by fans of erupted debris. Volcanic necks are formed when the magma hardens within the volcano. Red cinders found on the southwest side suggest an eruption was through that side.

When water washes away the softer materials that surrounds a volcano, the basaltic blocks drop into a dense mass around the base that eventually prevents further erosion. If indeed this volcano was standing in 500' of water in the early Pleistocene, there was a great deal of water available to consolidate the current formation into a fortress which has since survived those lakes and, perhaps, created the fans where juniper now grow.

Top: Black mesa behind cottonwoods along the Rio Grande taken from the west side along route 30.
Bottom: Mesa taken from northeast; the ranch road wanders towards it after leaving the far arroyo.