Devils Garden

About Devils Garden

The Devils Garden lava field, the NW-most of a group of three youthful-looking basaltic lava fields SE of Newberry volcano, east of the Cascade Range, contains 117 km2 of overlapping pahoehoe lava flows erupted from fissure vents at the NE part of the field. Inflated pahoehoe flows were erupted from spatter ramparts and spatter cones onto a nearly flat-lying surface surrounding several large kipukas of older rocks. The extremely fluid and inflated lavas left flows that typically increased from about a half meter thickness near the vent to about 5 m in more distal areas and have a volume of 1.2 km3. The flows are older than the Mazama Ash (6,800 years old) but are fresh-looking and relatively unvegetated. The precise age of Devils Garden is not known, but was considered to be either Holocene (Smith et al. 1978; Sarna-Wojciki et al. 1983) or about 20,000 years old (Chitwood 1994).