As I mentioned before, I went through a phase where I wanted to convince people that the Sutter Buttes were actually the southernmost Cascade. I even went so far as to talk to a geologist about it (who didn't share my conclusion) but the USGS now does; go figure. Anyway, I got into climbing the things to take samples of the lava at or near the summit where they were exposed of the snow (on the snowy or glaciated ones), naively thinking that volcanoes work like those diagrams you see in middle school where there is a big lava reservoir underneath feeding multiple volcanoes. The aforementioned geologist told me that the basalt composition will reflect the overlying crust; you can't necessarily tell it's from volcanic range XYZ because of the composition.
But I got some cool-looking rocks out of the deal.
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