Sutter Buttes, California, USA
(c) 2005 Andrew alden, licensed to About, Inc. (fair use policy)
Sutter Buttes are a small, isolated, somewhat mysterious center of volcanism in an unexpected place: the heart of the Sacramento Valley. No one has quite worked out how they fit the big picture of California—are they an outlier of the Cascades? an outlier of the Coast Range volcanic series?
The group of low mountains is usually hidden in the agricultural haze as you drive on Interstate 5 south of Redding, but on occasional clear days like this Sutter Buttes intrigue the viewer with their clarity. Access is difficult, though, as the hills are private ranchland. Perhaps the best view is from the air, where the Buttes display a dramatic circular structure, deeply eroded to reveal the innards of Pleistocene rhyolitic volcanoes. See all that and more in the Sutter Buttes Gallery, based on a geologic tour I took in 2007.
