The great cliff wall of the Superstition Mountains — the Flatiron, Weavers Needle, and the hoodoos: the eroded remains of a chain of ancient supervolcanoes.
Look up at that whole range of cliffs and spires marching along beside you, and know that you are looking at the wreckage of fire — because the Superstition Mountains are volcanoes. Not one, but a whole overlapping chain of them, and not ordinary volcanoes either — these were supervolcanoes, enormous ones, that erupted around eighteen to twenty-five million years ago in blasts almost too big to picture. They threw out staggering volumes of white-hot ash, so much that afterward the ground collapsed inward into giant craters, miles across, called calderas.
That ash settled and fused, under its own heat, into a hard rock called tuff — and it's that welded volcanic tuff that makes up almost everything you see here: the banded cliffs, the balanced hoodoos, the pinnacles. Over the millions of years since, wind and rain have carved the soft parts away and left the hard cores standing, and that's how you get the mountain's famous landmarks. That flat-topped, anvil-shaped block on the skyline is the Flatiron. And hidden back in the range is a slender thousand-foot spire called Weavers Needle — a tower of solid tuff that treasure-hunters have used for generations as the great landmark to steer by when they go looking for the Dutchman's mine.
So the drama of this place isn't an accident. You're driving alongside the roots of dead supervolcanoes, sculpted by time into a skyline so wild and strange that people have been telling stories about it for as long as they've lived in its shadow. Roll on.
Photo: Photographed by Doug Dolde; · Public domain
