50 free Lassen Volcanic National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lassen Peak is the southernmost active volcano of which mountains?
Cascades
The park sits in northeastern California near Redding and Susanville, in the Shasta Cascade section of the range.
Q 02Lassen Peak holds what world record among volcanoes?
Largest plug dome volcano
It is a lava dome that pushed up through the flank of a vanished stratovolcano, probably reaching its full height in just a few years.
Q 03The park is one of the few places on Earth where all four types of volcano can be found; which are they?
Plug dome, shield, cinder cone and stratovolcano
Mount Harkness, Red Mountain, Prospect Peak and Raker Peak are the shield volcanoes, each topped by its own cinder cone.
Q 04How tall is Lassen Peak?
10,457 feet
It has 14 permanent snowfields but no glaciers, and the road that skirts it is the highest in the whole range.
Q 05What subduction process supplies the heat for Lassen's volcanism?
The Gorda plate diving under North America
The same subduction feeds the whole Cascade arc; nine seismometers relay data to the USGS in Menlo Park.
Q 06Which president designated Cinder Cone and Lassen Peak as separate national monuments in 1907?
Theodore Roosevelt
The area had first been protected as the Lassen Peak Forest Preserve; the two monuments were merged into a national park in 1916.
Q 07On what date did the park's most powerful eruption occur, blasting ash 280 miles east?
May 22, 1915
The column rose over 30,000 feet within half an hour and could be seen from Eureka, 150 miles west; the flank it wrecked is now the Devastated Area.
Q 08Lassen Peak and which other volcano were the only two in the contiguous US to erupt in the 20th century?
Mount St. Helens
Lassen's total 1914-17 output was 0.007 cubic miles, dwarfed by the 0.24 cubic miles of St. Helens in 1980.
Q 09In which year was Lassen Volcanic National Park established, while the peak was still erupting?
1916
Congress acted on August 9, 1916, weeks before the National Park Service itself was created; steam blasts continued into 1921.
Q 10How many people were killed by the 1914-1921 eruptions?
None
Warnings got people out in time, though several houses along the creeks were destroyed by mudflows.
Q 11Which local businessman took the best-known photographs of Lassen Peak's eruptions?
Benjamin F. Loomis
He wrote that the June 14, 1914 eruption was fearfully grand; a museum at Manzanita Lake is dedicated to him.
Q 12Lassen Peak sits on the flank of which vanished stratovolcano, once about a thousand feet taller?
Mount Tehama
Also called Brokeoff Volcano, it was 11 to 15 miles across at the base and left a two-mile caldera when it collapsed or eroded away.
Q 13Roughly how long ago did Lassen Peak begin to rise as a lava dome?
About 27,000 years
Older estimates said 18,000; the dome shattered the rock above it into a talus apron and grew to full height in perhaps a few years.
Q 21Why did the Park Service close the visitor center and lodgings at Manzanita Lake in 1974?
Rockslide danger from Chaos Crags
The USGS warned the buildings lay in the path of a slide if an earthquake or eruption struck; a campground and the Loomis museum remain.
Q 22The Chaos Crags, the largest of the young domes near Lassen Peak, began forming about how long ago?
1,100 years
Explosive pumice eruptions were followed by lava, and the unstable domes partly collapsed into pyroclastic flows.
Q 23Peter Lassen, the park's namesake, was a blacksmith from which country?
Denmark
Q 14What is the park's largest hydrothermal area, with boiling mudpots and fumaroles near 198 °F?
Bumpass Hell
There are no true geysers in the park; temperatures up to 230 °F have been recorded in its thermal ground.
Q 15What happened to Kendall Vanhook Bumpass, the cowboy for whom the park's biggest thermal area is named?
He lost a leg after breaking through into a mudpot
He broke through the thin crust into scalding mud on a trip in the 1860s and the leg had to be amputated.
Q 16Which geothermal area between Lassen Peak and Brokeoff Mountain marks the vanished volcano's centre?
Sulphur Works
Little Hot Springs Valley and Diamond Point, an old lava conduit, are other thermal spots inside the caldera.
Q 17Tree-ring analysis has dated the last eruption of Cinder Cone to which year?
1666
Settlers in 1850-51 reported fire thrown to a terrible height, but the science points to a single 17th-century event.
Q 18What are the Fantastic Lava Beds?
Basalt flows from the base of Cinder Cone
They dammed creeks to create two lakes, and a pioneer wagon route later passed right by them.
Q 19How high does Cinder Cone rise above the surrounding land?
About 750 feet
Its ash spread over 30 square miles, and its summit crater has a double rim from two phases of one eruption.
Q 20Manzanita Lake was created about three centuries ago when what happened?
A rock avalanche from Chaos Crags dammed a creek
The Chaos Jumbles avalanche rode a cushion of compressed air at about 100 mph and flattened the forest in its path.
He guided emigrants past the peak to the Sacramento Valley in the 1830s and was murdered in Nevada in 1859 while prospecting for silver.
Q 24Which Native people believed the peak was full of fire and water and would one day blow apart?
Atsugewi
A neighbouring people's name for the peak, Kohm Yah-mah-nee, was given to the visitor center that opened in 2008.
Q 25The park's Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center takes its name from which language's word for Lassen Peak?
Mountain Maidu
It opened in 2008 on the site of the demolished Lassen Chalet, the last piece of a ski area that closed in 1992.
Q 26Which 1851 pioneer wagon route to the Sacramento Valley was cut through the park past Cinder Cone?
Nobles
William Nobles found an easy link between the Applegate Trail in Nevada and the Lassen Trail; it replaced Lassen's own route.
Q 27Who was the first white man recorded to reach Lassen Peak, passing through in 1821?
Jedediah Smith
The peak was named for the Danish guide only after the Gold Rush brought settlers flooding in.
Q 28How high does the Main Park Road climb near Lassen Peak?
8,512 feet
That makes it the highest road in the whole range; 40 feet of snow can pile up near Lake Helen and drifts last into July.
Q 29Roughly how much snow falls at Lake Helen, at 8,200 feet, in a year?
600 to 700 inches
That is probably the snowiest place in the state; the visitor center lower down still gets around 430 inches.
Q 30Why does the park get more precipitation than anywhere else in its range south of the Three Sisters?
No rain shadow from the Coast Ranges
The 29-mile park road was built between 1925 and 1931 and its Highway 89 section closes for the winter under the snowpack.