Lassen Volcanic National Park Trivia
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44 free Lassen Volcanic National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Lassen Volcanic National Park trivia quiz covers the northern California park where the southernmost active volcano of the Cascades erupted from 1914 to 1917 and where all four kinds of volcano stand within a day's drive of one another. Questions cover Lassen Peak and its May 1915 explosion, the vanished stratovolcano Mount Tehama, Cinder Cone and the Fantastic Lava Beds, Chaos Crags and the avalanche that made Manzanita Lake, the boiling mudpots of Bumpass Hell and Sulphur Works, and the snow that buries the park road forty feet deep. The history side takes in the Atsugewi and Maidu, the Danish blacksmith Peter Lassen, the Nobles Emigrant Trail, the cowboy who lost a leg in a mudpot, photographer B. F. Loomis, Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 monuments and the 1916 park, the wolves that returned in 2024 and the 2021 Dixie Fire that burned two-thirds of the park. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it works for a car game on the park highway or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Volcanoes and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lassen Peak is the southernmost active volcano of which mountains?
Cascades
Cascades. The chain's southern end has crept north through time: three million years ago its last active volcanoes stood nearly 20 miles south of Lassen Peak.
Q 02Lassen Peak is one of the world's largest examples of which type of volcano?
Plug dome
Plug dome. Its lava was too stiff to flow away and piled up over the vent into a steep mound; the other three types all stand elsewhere in the park.
Q 03What did visitors report about the 30-ton boulder swept down by Lassen Peak's 1915 mudflow?
It stayed hot to the touch
It stayed hot to the touch. The boulder had sat in the volcano's vent before the mudflow carried it down, and it has been called Hot Rock ever since.
Q 04Which taller volcano stands north of Lassen Peak?
Mount Shasta
Mount Shasta. Eruption after eruption built it to more than 14,000 feet, while Lassen Peak, at about 10,450 feet, rose in a single short burst.
Q 05What supplies the heat for Lassen's volcanoes?
An ocean plate sinking under the continent
An ocean plate sinking under the continent. As the slab descends off the Northern California coast it generates the magma that feeds the whole chain of volcanoes north to British Columbia.
Q 06Which president designated Cinder Cone and Lassen Peak as separate national monuments in the early 1900s?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the two monuments in May 1907; after Lassen Peak began erupting seven years later, Congress joined them into a single national park.
Q 07What name is still given to the slope of Lassen Peak swept bare by its eruptions of May 1915?
Devastated Area
Devastated Area. A mudflow and then a blast of hot ash and gas flattened about three square miles of forest, though trees have since grown back over much of it.
Q 08Lassen Peak and which other volcano were the only two in the contiguous US to erupt in the 20th century?
Mount St. Helens
Mount St. Helens. Its 1980 blast was the range's first eruption since Lassen fell quiet, and it prompted geologists to step up their watch on Lassen and its neighbours.
Q 09Why was nobody killed when a 1915 mudflow from Lassen Peak swept away homes on Hat Creek?
Neighbours raised the alarm
Neighbours raised the alarm. Homesteaders warned one another as the flood came down the creek in the night and scrambled uphill; several houses were destroyed, but everyone escaped.
Q 10Who took the best-known photographs of Lassen Peak's eruptions?
Benjamin F. Loomis
Benjamin F. Loomis. His glass-plate photographs of the eruptions gripped the nation and helped win support for the park, and he later built and gave it the museum that still shows them.
Q 11Lassen Peak rose on the flank of which older stratovolcano, since worn down to a ring of lesser peaks?
Mount Tehama
Mount Tehama. After it fell silent, hot acidic water rotted its lavas and glaciers carted the rubble away, leaving Brokeoff Mountain and Mount Diller as stumps of its flanks.
Q 12Roughly how long ago did Lassen Peak rise?
About 27,000 years
About 27,000 years. The peak shot up within a few years, then Ice Age glaciers ground at it for thousands more, leaving its slopes draped in broken rock.
Q 13What is Lassen Volcanic's largest hydrothermal area, with boiling mudpots and roaring fumaroles?
Bumpass Hell
Q 21Which volcanic feature just north of Lassen Peak formed only about 1,100 years ago?
Chaos Crags
Chaos Crags. They grew in the last large eruption in the Lassen area: blasts of pumice and ash, then six steep mounds of stiff lava, parts of which collapsed into fast flows of hot ash.
Q 22Peter Lassen, the park's namesake, was a blacksmith from which country?
Denmark
Denmark. Lassen guided settlers past the peak that took his name, but the emigrant trail he blazed was so punishing that wagon trains gave it up within a few years.
Q 23Which Native people, who wintered along Hat Creek, moved into the north of today's Lassen Volcanic National Park each summer?
Atsugewi
Bumpass Hell. It sits where steam from the park's underground reservoir of boiling water escapes most strongly, and its Big Boiler vent has been clocked at 322 °F.
Q 14What befell the cowboy whose name one of Lassen's boiling thermal basins still bears, on a visit there in 1865?
He lost a leg
He lost a leg. Bumpass broke through the thin crust over a boiling mudpot while guiding a newspaper editor, and the scalded leg had to be amputated.
Q 15Which roadside geothermal area between Lassen Peak and Brokeoff Mountain sits near the core of a long-eroded volcano?
Sulphur Works
Sulphur Works. Its acid steam has cooked the old volcano's hard grey lava into soft red, yellow and buff clays, and the ground there is still being remade.
Q 16What dated Cinder Cone's only eruption to the 1600s?
Tree rings
Tree rings. Rings in nearby pines point to 1666 as the year, and a willow already full-grown near the summit in 1853 gave the lie to prospectors' tales of an 1851 blast.
Q 17What are Lassen's Fantastic Lava Beds?
Lava flows from Cinder Cone's base
Lava flows from Cinder Cone's base. The lava broke out at the foot of the cone instead of the summit, and it still looks so fresh that people long took it for only a few decades old.
Q 18Where does the water in Lassen's boiling pools and steam vents come from?
Rain and snowmelt seeping underground
Rain and snowmelt seeping underground. Deep down it meets hot rock beneath Lassen Peak, boils, and rises again as the steam that drives every mudpot and fumarole in the park.
Q 19Manzanita Lake in Lassen Volcanic formed a few centuries ago when what happened?
A rock avalanche dammed a creek
A rock avalanche dammed a creek. Part of a young volcanic peak nearby collapsed, and the debris ran four miles, far enough to climb 400 feet up the mountain opposite.
Q 20Which national scenic trail passes through Lassen Volcanic National Park on its route from Mexico to Canada?
Pacific Crest Trail
Pacific Crest Trail. Its 2,650 miles follow the mountain crests from border to border, and through-hikers cross Lassen by way of Warner Valley, past the park's boiling springs.
Atsugewi. Deep snow made the high country a summer camp only; the tribe wintered in the Hat Creek valley and is today one of the eleven bands of the Pit River Tribe.
Q 24The park's Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center takes its name from which language's word for Lassen Peak?
Mountain Maidu
Kohm Yah-mah-nee means 'snow mountain' in Mountain Maidu, the language of the people whose homeland took in the park's southern slopes; the centre opened in 2008 near the southwest entrance.
Q 25Which 1851 pioneer wagon route to the Sacramento Valley was cut through today's Lassen Volcanic National Park past Cinder Cone?
Nobles
Nobles. William Nobles pioneered the shortcut in 1851, and wagon trains soon abandoned Peter Lassen's longer, harder trail for it.
Q 26Which American fur trapper is recorded as passing near Lassen Peak in 1828?
Jedediah Smith
Jedediah Smith. He skirted the peak on a trek up the Sacramento Valley towards Oregon, three years before Comanches killed him on the trail to Santa Fe.
Q 27What operated beside Lassen Volcanic's southwest entrance until the early 1990s, where the main visitor center now stands?
A downhill ski area
A downhill ski area. Lifts ran on the slopes there for decades, and when the old ski chalet was pulled down in 2005 the new visitor center took its place.
Q 28Up to how deep is the snow crews clear from Lassen's main park road each spring?
About 40 feet
About 40 feet. The snowpack on the road's highest stretches can lie that deep, which is why the road sometimes stays shut until July.
Q 29Lake Helen is named for a painter who in 1864 became the first white woman known to do what?
Climb Lassen Peak
Climb Lassen Peak. Helen Tanner Brodt and her husband joined pioneer Pierson Reading's party to the summit, and Reading named the lake below it after her.
Q 30Which of California's rarest mammals has one of its last known strongholds around Lassen Peak?
Sierra Nevada red fox
Sierra Nevada red fox. Dense fur on its toe pads carries it over deep snow, and it is so scarce and its range so rugged that biologists have struggled to study it since the 1930s.