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46 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.
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Q 01Lassen Peak is the southernmost active volcano of which mountains?
Cascades
Lassen Peak is the southernmost active volcano in the Cascades, the arc of volcanoes that stretches north from California through Oregon and Washington into British Columbia.
Q 02Lassen Peak holds what world record among volcanoes?
Largest plug dome volcano
Lassen Peak is the world's largest plug dome volcano, a mass of stiff lava about 2,000 feet high and two miles across that rose through the flank of an older volcano, probably within a few years.
Q 03Which four types of volcano can all be found in the park?
Plug dome, shield, cinder cone and stratovolcano
The four are plug dome (Lassen Peak), shield (Prospect Peak and Mount Harkness), cinder cone (Cinder Cone itself) and stratovolcano (Brokeoff Mountain); few places on Earth hold all four.
Q 04How tall is Lassen Peak?
10,457 feet
Lassen Peak tops out at 10,457 feet; a 2.5-mile trail climbs about 2,000 feet from the road to the summit, where craters from the 1914-17 eruptions can be seen.
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
Theodore Roosevelt, who created 18 national monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act, proclaimed Lassen Peak and Cinder Cone national monuments on 6 May 1907; both lay inside the Lassen Peak Forest Reserve.
Q 07On what date did the park's most powerful eruption occur, blasting ash 280 miles east?
May 22, 1915
On May 22, 1915, Lassen blew a column of ash more than 30,000 feet high, visible from Eureka 150 miles to the west; the blast and mudflow flattened the forest now called 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 11Who took the best-known photographs of Lassen Peak's eruptions?
Benjamin F. Loomis
Benjamin F. Loomis, a businessman from nearby Viola, shot the June 14, 1914 eruption in a famous sequence; the Loomis Museum at Manzanita Lake, which he built in 1927, displays his work.
Q 12Lassen Peak sits on the flank of which vanished stratovolcano, once about a thousand feet taller?
Mount Tehama
Mount Tehama, also called Brokeoff Volcano, was a stratovolcano some 11,000 feet high and 11 to 15 miles across; Brokeoff Mountain, Mount Diller and Pilot Pinnacle are remnants of its rim.
Q 13Roughly how long ago did Lassen Peak begin to rise as a lava dome?
About 27,000 years
Q 21Which national scenic trail passes through the park on its route from Mexico to Canada?
Pacific Crest Trail
The Pacific Crest Trail runs about 17 miles through the eastern side of the park on its 2,650-mile route from Mexico to Canada; most northbound through-hikers pass in July.
Q 22The Chaos Crags, the largest of the young domes near Lassen Peak, began forming about how long ago?
1,100 years
The Chaos Crags grew about 1,100 years ago in the park's most recent dome-building episode: explosive pumice eruptions came first, then six stiff lava domes, parts of which collapsed into pyroclastic flows.
Q 23Peter Lassen, the park's namesake, was a blacksmith from which country?
Denmark
Lassen Peak rose about 27,000 years ago, a figure revised upward from an earlier estimate of 18,000; ice-age glaciers later scoured the young dome, leaving the polished rock seen on its flanks.
Q 14What is the park's largest hydrothermal area, with boiling mudpots and roaring fumaroles?
Bumpass Hell
Bumpass Hell, a 16-acre basin of mudpots, steam vents and boiling pools, is the park's largest hydrothermal area; its Big Boiler fumarole has been measured at 322 °F, among the hottest in the world.
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
Sulphur Works, beside the park road just above the southwest entrance, sits near the old vent of the vanished volcano; its roadside mudpot and sulphur-scented steam vents are the park's most easily reached thermal features.
Q 17Tree-ring analysis has dated the last eruption of Cinder Cone to which year?
1666
Tree rings from pines scarred or killed by the eruption date it to 1666; settlers' reports of fire thrown from the cone in 1850-51 were later shown to be mistaken, and the eruption was a single event.
Q 18What are the Fantastic Lava Beds?
Basalt flows from the base of Cinder Cone
The Fantastic Lava Beds are rough, blocky basalt flows that poured from the base of Cinder Cone rather than from its summit; the jumbled black rock spreads south and east of the cone.
Q 19How high does Cinder Cone rise above the surrounding land?
About 750 feet
Cinder Cone rises about 750 feet above the surrounding land, a near-perfect cone of loose scoria; the trail up its steep slopes ends at a double-rimmed summit crater left by 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
About 300 years ago a rock avalanche from Chaos Crags, the Chaos Jumbles, dammed Manzanita Creek to form the lake; the debris is thought to have ridden a cushion of compressed air at 100 mph or more.
Peter Lassen, born in Farum, Denmark, in 1800, trained as a blacksmith before emigrating; he opened his emigrant trail past the peak in 1848 and was murdered near Nevada's Black Rock Desert in 1859.
Q 24Which Native people believed the peak was full of fire and water and would one day blow apart?
Atsugewi
The Atsugewi, who lived along Hat Creek north of the peak, held that it was full of fire and water and would one day blow apart, a belief the eruptions of the 1910s seemed to bear out.
Q 25The 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 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 27Which American fur trapper is recorded as passing near Lassen Peak in 1828?
Jedediah Smith
Jedediah Smith led his trapping party north through the Sacramento Valley in spring 1828, passing west of the peak on the way to Oregon; the mountain man was killed by Comanches on the Santa Fe Trail in 1831.
Q 28How high does the Main Park Road climb near Lassen Peak?
8,512 feet
The road crests at 8,512 feet beside the Lassen Peak trailhead, the highest point on any road in the range; drifts up to 40 feet deep keep the pass closed into early summer most years.
Q 29Roughly how much snow falls at Lake Helen, at 8,200 feet, in a year?
600 to 700 inches
Lake Helen averages roughly 600 to 700 inches of snow a year, more than 50 feet, which makes it one of the snowiest spots in California; the lake usually stays frozen until July.
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.