Imagine an eruption that built a volcano and then selectively melted its interior. Imagine sets of faults that slice and dice the cone like a basalt tomato. Imagine bombs of gargantuan sizes that mantle the slopes. Imagine Tecolote; a lumpy, asymmetrical mess of a volcano with its coat of many colors, masquerading as an ordinary cinder cone. The eruption may have been ruled by the immutable laws of physics and the rock may be only basalt but there are things on this volcano that beggar the imagination. In all my years of crawling over its lava flows, faults, and fields of bombs; I remain dumbfounded by the sheer complexity of it all. Bombs, faults, multiple flows, valleys - none of these things are found on ordinary volcanoes.

Tecolote's coat of many colors has black basalt, gray cinder, velvety-brown desert varnished bombs, and yellow-red fumarole alteration. The cone has a hook-shaped, bomb-covered central massif, an attached "Cinder Block" (lower right) with four lava flows and three prominent valleys, and a ridge best described as the "Northwest Collapse" (upper left). A complex volcano gets a complex description composed of web pages, image galleries, and Google Earth files. Complain if it's too complex.

This page is a place holder for a section on Tecolote currently (2/16) in editing.