I'm glad I visited and walked this trail when I had a chance to back in 2001. This is the second great american landmark to become a mere memory that I have had the privilege to see firsthand. The first was Cinder Cone and its associated lava flow in Lassen Park California, which I visited for the first time in 1980. It had such spectacular features as the lava field, which up close looked like water waves frozen in mid crash. You couldn't walk on it or you'd be cut to ribbons. The cinder cone itself featured a perfectly 200' cylindrical hole in the middle that bottomed out in some similarly frozen lava. 20 years later the cinder cone had collapsed in on itself and the hole was a mere 20' feet deep. The lava field was a mere shadow of its former crystaline self with trees growing throughout; it was beginning to blend in with the background landscape. Since it had been there since the mid 1800's, I couldn't believe the amount of erosion that had taken place in the last 20 years, a sure sign of how "global warming" has accelerated the erosive forces for that hitherto slow-changing landscape. I presume that the change in level of rain and snowfall was the primary culprit.