Lassen gets a fraction of the visitors Yosemite does, and we think that's because nobody knows what to make of it. This park is a rule breaker and in this episode we catch it bending five rules of science, one at a time. Keep a tally with us.

We explain how all four types of volcano on Earth ended up inside a single park. We stand at a lake that looks like it's boiling but is ice cold, and climb a 300-ton boulder that an avalanche carried five miles. We meet Kendall Bumpass, the cowboy who discovered and lost a leg to the hydrothermal basin that bears his name. We tell the story of Benjamin Loomis, who walked toward an erupting volcano with a box camera, and whose six photographs helped turn Lassen into a national park in 1916.

And we end by talking about how life thrives in boiling acid and howNASA scientists (and actual hig ...