by Daniel Runyan In the 1500s, Spanish explorers traveled across New Mexico searching for fabled cities of gold. They never did discover a city of gold, but one thing they did find was a treacherous, sprawling,  ancient volcanic landscape. They marveled at the land laid before them, and the sheer variety of basaltic formations and remnants of past lava flows made the place an absolute pain to navigate. Such a pain in fact that Spanish mapmakers named the barren volcanic […]