Thomas Wright Battlefield

Few places in Lava Beds National Monument so clearly weave together geology and history as the short trail to Black Crater and the Thomas-Wright Battlefield. In less than three miles, you’ll stand atop a fiery remnant of the earth’s violent past and walk across the site of one of the most tragic encounters of the Modoc War.

This short hike delivers a rare double experience: the raw drama of volcanic geology paired with the sobering history of the Modoc War. Black Crater tells the story of fire and earth; the battlefield tells the story of a people fighting for their homeland against impossible odds. Walk both, and you’ll see how landscape and history intertwine here in Lava Beds, each shaping and shadowing the other.

Your first stop is Black Crater, which geologists explain is not a true crater at all but a spatter cone. Thousands of years ago, gouts of molten lava shot skyward from a vent, cooling just enough in midair to fall back to earth in sticky blobs. Layer upon layer piled up, still hot enough to fuse together, forming this squat cone of jagged rock.

Despite its name, Black Crater isn’t just black. Look closely and you’ll see subtle shades – rusty orange, wine red, even deep purples – revealing the mineral cocktail within the basalt. From the rim, the view is wide open: sagebrush plains stretch to the horizon, while the jumbled lava fields tell of fire just below the surface. It’s an easy climb but one that delivers a full 360-degree panorama of the monument’s volcanic tablelands.

From Black Crater, the trail continues across sage and bunchgrass, following the edge of an ancient lava flow. Interpretive signs along the way sketch out the next story – this one from 1872, when the U.S. Army was still trying to corral the Modoc people back onto the Oregon reservation they had fled.

Here, four miles from Army headquarters at Gillem’s Camp, Captains Thomas and Wright led a patrol of 68 soldiers. They stopped for lunch in what looked like open, harmless terrain. But the Modoc, watching from hidden positions in the lava, struck with deadly surprise. In the span of minutes, two-thirds of the patrol lay dead or wounded.

The chaos was compounded by panic. Some soldiers fled, running the four miles back to camp, while others scattered in the lava. A rescue party tried to respond, but in a bitter stroke of irony, they became lost in a snowstorm and neglected to bring food, water, or even the camp doctor. What began as a simple patrol became one of the Army’s most humiliating defeats in the Modoc War.

Standing on this ground today, it is easy to see how the soldiers were caught off guard. The sagebrush flats seem open, yet every fissure and outcropping in the lava offered the Modoc cover. Their knowledge of this landscape gave them the advantage – an advantage the Army underestimated until it was too late.