Lava Tubes: Eight Hundred Caves in the Dark

Under your feet and under the fields stretching north and south of here, there are hollow passages in the rock.

Lava tubes form when a volcanic flow cools on the outside while molten rock continues moving through the interior. The outer crust hardens into a shell. The interior drains out. What remains is a tube, sometimes a few feet across, sometimes the width of a highway, sometimes extending for hundreds of yards. Lava Beds National Monument contains more than eight hundred documented cave entrances across approximately forty-seven thousand acres of volcanic terrain.

The Modoc knew every one of them that mattered.

When the United States Army arrived in the winter of eighteen seventy-two with maps and artillery, they were moving across the surface of a landscape the Modoc navigated underground. The tubes provided concealment, routes of movement, and supply lines the Army could not see or follow. The Army's advantage in numbers and equipment meant little against terrain its adversaries had spent generations learning.

You can walk through the tubes today. Some require flashlights; rangers hand them out at the visitor center. The darkness inside is complete when you extinguish the light. The Modoc fighters moved through that darkness by memory, in the middle of a war, carrying what they needed to keep fifty-three people alive for five months.

The entrances look like holes in the ground. What they were, in eighteen seventy-three, was everything.