Blogs from Craters Of The Moon National Monument, Idaho, United States, North America - page 2

I am writing this blog entry from my aunt and uncle's house in Buhl, ID and so I don't have access to my own computer and they anf Ken are all upstairs having a drink (or two or...) so I have to be quick! Today started with our breakfast in the restaurant of the hotel and then a 2 hour drive west to Craters of the Moon National Monument. What an amazing place. It looks so desolate and eerie as it is a huge field of lava rock from thousands of years of volcanic activity in this region of Idaho. The landscape is mostly black lava rock with some very interesting formations depending on the cycle the volcanic eruptions were in....some were flows, some were splatters and some were piles of molten lava hardened back into ... read more

The song on the radio startled me out of my driving trance. I’d never heard it before—I’d only read about it recently, in a biography of Phil Spector. He didn’t write the song—Carole King, of all people, co-wrote it—but his arrangement and production drained it of any hint of irony. The landscape I drove through showed marks of violence as well: it looked as if glaciers had once plowed through the sandy deserts of the Nevada/Idaho border, leaving jagged canyons. Rivers ripped thorough, cutting gorges, like the one just north of Twin Falls—the one Evel Knievel didn’t quite jump. That geological violence had left beauty behind. In my mind I saw Knievel jumping and falling and it turned into Homer Simpson’s fall down the gorge—my mind is like that, especially when I have hours in the ... read more

Wow, so today is an exciting day for me and exactly one week since I've been back in Idaho. Life has not been boring though (as it sometimes can be when I'm here during the summer months with nothing to do). I ended the last day of my roadtrip by first going off to see the Craters of the Moon national monument. What makes this little spot near Arco, Idaho amazing is that there are huge lava fields (you can see it from space) that includes basaltic lava beds, tree molds, and caves only...there are no volcanoes! So where did it come from? The lava is actually from eruptions that occured long ago and then "moved" as plates started shifting to its present location along the Great Rift in Idaho. Some of the oldest flows in ... read more

Craters of the Moon National Monument was other-worldly, but beautiful. The lava flows, boulders and cones were fascinating. But the really amazing thing was the wildflowers growing out of that dead-looking black ground. There are 750,000 acres of lava, that in some places looks as if it was just spewed out of the ground and tilled up in rows. We drove the Sawtooth Scenic byway through Sun Valley to Galena Peak Summit. It was a beautiful drive, but the towns of Ketchum and Hailey had a kind of phony frontier facade feel (how's that for alliteration.) Galena Peak Summit looks over the Salmon River Valley to the Sawtooth Mountains. A gorgeous wide view. The Salmon River Scenic Byway runs along the Salmon River for 162 miles. The climate changed from green, lush mountains to dry ... read more

First stop: Nat-soo-pah hot springs. It's a large natural hot spring which was directed into a huge concrete swimming pool, spa and hot soak tub. Think public pool, except it's warmer than body temperature and the water is green due to the iron pyrite (fools gold) that the water flows through underground before it feeds into the pool. They even had a water slide. And it was perfect timing; we had been in the mood to go swimming for a couple of weeks. Then, twin falls, where beautiful waterfalls cascade into a canyon just north of the hot springs in the town of Twin Falls. It's also a site for one of Evil Knevil's jumps, which he actually aborted. We're not sure if it was because of the distance over the canyon or weather or ... read more