People heading to the desert southeast of Bend laugh when retired Woodburn teacher Theresa Ellis suggests they stop at Crack-in-the-Ground.
They think she’s pulling their leg, but if they drive to Christmas Valley in a remote stretch of southern Oregon and decide to endure the bumpy Crack-in-the-Ground Road, they will be rewarded with a natural wonder: an ancient volcanic fissure two miles long, 15 feet wide and up to 70 feet deep.
Tension along a fault zone created the fracture, opening up a fissure in a field of lava that originally flowed from nearby Green Mountain, a small shield volcano, some 740,000 years ago…