Update – December 13, 2021: The Kilbourne Hole was made a part of Organ Peaks-Desert Mountains National Monument after the following blog post was written. Last week I made another visit to the Kilbourne Hole to see if anything had changed. Fortunately, nothing much has changed and it is still a great place for exploring and wandering.
This sign is the only change that I noticed, and it is more than a mile from the Kilbourne Hole.
As you can see from this drone shot, the area around the Kilbourne is still wide open country.
The original post starts below:
The Kilbourne Hole is a huge 1 ¾ mile by 1 ¼ mile crater in the Chihuahuan Desert west of Las Cruces, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas that is over 300 feet deep. It is not a meteor impact crater; it is a maar volcano.
A maar volcano is like a huge volcanic burp. With a maar volcano, magma flowing to the surface did not reach the top to create a cinder cone or lava flow. Instead the magma flow became blocked and the available ground water then became super-heated. The resulting steam pressure eventually became so great that it blew off the covering mantle and left a huge flat-floor crater.
Can you imagine what the explosion must have been like?
Here’s how the Kilbourne Hole looks on Google Earth.
