Roam School Family

Lassen Volcanic National Park | How many rules can one park break?

July 16, 2026·17 min
Episode Description from the Publisher

Lassen gets a fraction of the visitors Yosemite does, and we think that's because nobody knows what to make of it. This park is a rule breaker and in this episode we catch it bending five rules of science, one at a time. Keep a tally with us.We explain how all four types of volcano on Earth ended up inside a single park. We stand at a lake that looks like it's boiling but is ice cold, and climb a 300-ton boulder that an avalanche carried five miles. We meet Kendall Bumpass, the cowboy who discovered and lost a leg to the hydrothermal basin that bears his name. We tell the story of Benjamin Loomis, who walked toward an erupting volcano with a box camera, and whose six photographs helped turn Lassen into a national park in 1916.And we end by talking about how life thrives in boiling acid and howNASA scientists (and actual high school students) come to this park to study life's potential in the farthest reaches of our solar system -- Jupiter and Saturn's moons. It's an odd park but we had fun. We hope you'll join us.

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