About 1,000 years ago, local Native peoples in this corner of the Southwest experienced increasing tremors, possible changes in animal behavior, and warming ground before the earth cracked open and a 1,000-foot-high cinder cone now known as Sunset Crater rose where open parks and forests had been. Volcanic ash buried about 64,000 acres of potential farmland, many people lost their homes and livelihoods, and stories expressing the eruption’s significance were told and retold as word of the phenomenon may have spread across the continent. Today, the area’s American Indian groups regard this as a sacred landscape where life was cleansed and where a connection exists to the world below and the universe above, a landscape that cautions, reminds, and teaches.