Fly Me To The Moon

Day 19: Sept 14, 2011

Craters of the Moon National Monument is truly a place that is unique to this continent. We were in a state of constant amazement from the time we woke up this morning, surrounded by black rock. We started in the Visitor Center with a film about the area, which got us oriented. The “lava lands” were familiar to the Shoshone Indians but to few others until around 1900, when sheer curiosity brought in people interested in geology. (The Oregon Trail pioneers worked their way around--it would have been impossible to get a wagon across this terrain.) The park is largely unspoiled, the campgrounds are almost never full, and it is so QUIET in so many places. Last night, except for a very occasional sound of a car passing on the highway (which is fairly close to the campground), we heard absolutely nothing.

Here's a photo of the "black campground".

Another thing I have to say this morning--it isn’t TOTALLY black. There are plants growing which give a green color in some areas. Even some trees called Limber Pine have grown in the area. There are a number of other small plants. So the color isn’t as pitch black as it appeared last night. But it’s pretty black for all that!
We spent about 4 hours on the 7 mile park loop road. There are paths through several areas, giving a view of lava flows from the North Crater. The estimate is that this volcano erupted only about 2,000 years ago! B’rei’sheet continuing into times of recorded history. Really amazing!
In the area called the Devil’s Garden, I became fascinated with the few plants that grow in the black cinders.
Then we had a wonderful ½ mile hike up “Inferno Cone” to get a view of cinder cones lined up along the Great Rift, which is a 52 mile fissure where lava would come up and form these cones. This is a photo of the Inferno Cone from the parking lot--we hiked up the left side (you can't see the whole thing. That's Mo on the far left. And @ to Aimee, how about "Inferno Cone" for an SL handle?)
This is a view of the Great Rift line. The foreground of the photo is the black cinder cone we were standing on.
The top of the cone was the big surprise--I expected plain black crunchy gravel again, but it was lush with shrubs, little flowers, and even a couple of large trees. The climb was one of those amazing experiences where there was an unexpected bonus which makes you simply marvel at the world. You can see the cone is all cinders; from the side we approached, none of the vegetation was visible. It was so cool.
And finally we took the short pathways to look inside the Spatter Cones. These are miniature volcanoes which throw their insides out like “splatter”--and are responsible for a lot of the chunky blocks which are all over the park. We even learned different names for the different types of lava rocks… these splatter chunks are called “aa” (it’s a Hawaiian name, pronounced ah-ah). Here's Joe standing inside one.
There was snow in the bottom of one of the cones--this is on way plants get moisture, is from these little pockets of snow. But nothing seemed to be growing down there, it was probably too deep and dark.

This park was definitely a 10 on the WOW Scale. I highly recommend it to everyone. Now I just have to find a way to get to Hawaii and see volcanoes actually erupting. But until then, this was really an amazing experience. My pictures, as usual, will not do it justice.

We left Craters of the Moon around 1:30 pm heading towards Lava Hot Springs in south-east Idaho. We made a brief stop to take my photo in front of the World’s Largest Potato--we were right in that town and I couldn’t resist something so silly. There was also the Potato Museum, but we didn’t go in; Joey said the whole concept seemed “a little bit au gratin.” LOL!! All the way along the road, btw, we are seeing volcanoes in the distance--once you get educated, you can’t miss it. They are such young volcanoes here, so they still have a distinguished cone shape and a flat crater top.

We passed Pocatello, which is nestled in a valley among the mountains, and as I write this, at Mo’s kitchen table, we are coming into Lava Hot Springs…

OK! So this is The Plan, as a friend of mine always says. We are now parked and hooked up at the KOA in Lava Hot Springs, about 50 feet away from the river, which is cascading just here. Our bedroom window will be looking right toward it. About a 5 minute walk from here, on a little pathway along the highway, is Idaho’s Famous Lava Hot Pools. We walked over there to take a look, and it looks fabulous. Five hot spring fed pools with 5 different temperatures in a garden setting. The garden has been carved into the lava walls of the site--we are perched on the side of an old volcano. In fact, I can see the jagged crags of rock sticking out of the mountain just ahead of us, on the other side of the roadway.

It is now 7pm. Joe is making dinner while I upload the blog, and the plan is to walk on the path after dinner to the hot spring pools, and spend the evening there (they are open until 11pm). And then we will walk home on the little path, which will undoubtedly be an adventure in itself. Luckily we have a brand new halogen flashlight . We are SO excited about the lava pools, and I am sorry I didn’t have my camera on our walk earlier to photograph the gardens--maybe I’ll do it in the morning. But for now--it’s been a volcanic day all the way around, and so amazing and awesome.

Varied Landscapes

Day 18: Sept. 13, 2011

We planned a long driving day for today, so we woke up early (i.e. when the alarms actually went off!) and were out of our campsite, lovely though it was, by about 8 a.m. Stopped for gas in the city of Bend, and then headed east out of the city. Almost as if we crossed an invisible line, we were in ranchland and sagebrush territory. If you look at the map, you will see that there is nothing between Bend and the town of Hines/Burns except about 130 miles. Well, there is NOTHING between them--as landscapes go, it was remarkable for its sameness. Not that we didn’t enjoy it--but it was simply amazing how much nothingness there can be along one road. And that includes traffic--there was almost none. We love that.

I joked with Joe that I could write the blog right then, as a little poem, and be finished already. It went like this:

We drove all day. Nothing else to say. We arrived okay. Now I’m hitting the hay.

The day wasn’t much different than that, actually, except for the details. Joe drove the first 2 hours and we stopped for gas in Hines. It’s a very small place. Burns was not much larger, although it had some fast food places and some kind of small strip shopping center. They are adjacent--really one town. Then it was my turn to drive. And the scenery changed: this time into wonderful mountains, curving roads, and lots of colors and volcanic outcroppings (we are experts at identifying these now). A river ran next to us for a while, cutting through the mountains. They weren’t huge mountains but they were remarkably pretty--lots of browns (we passed one which looked like it was made out of cocoa), some bright white (we aren’t sure what that was), and in one place, some bright reddish color. I would have taken lots of photos but unfortunately I was driving, and my co-pilot said he doesn’t do photos.
After the mountains, we encountered a lot of agricultural scenery, which culminated in Ontario, Oregon. The billboards on the sides of the barns announced that it was the Onion Capital of the World, and that they export 22,000 lbs of onions every year. The amazing part was, we could smell the onions as we drove past, even though we could see the tops still in the ground. I never went through a town which smelled like onions before.

We reached the end of the second 2 hours at the border of Oregon and Idaho. Someplace in Oregon we crossed into Mountain Time, so we lost an hour. I continued to drive for another couple of hours until somewhere past Boise, when we stopped for gas again and Joe took over. Southern Idaho also had a lot of absolute nothingness, but we were on the Interstate so we did have cars. We also saw a lot of farms, where intensive irrigation had allowed the nothingness to become fruitful. There was a line of mountains marching along to the north the entire way.
Finally we left the Interstate and headed northeast, and the mountains got closer. The landscape changed yet again, from the previous farms to range (we saw a lot of cattle out grazing, and at least one feedlot), but most noticeable was the lava flow poking up through the grasses. There was sage, and yellow flowers (we think that’s the sage blooming, but we aren’t sure), and yellow grasses in tufts, and black crunchy-looking rock everywhere.

We stopped for gas one last time (there is a theme here: you do NOT want to get caught short on gas when you are driving through so much nothingness!) and then we approached Craters of the Moon National Monument. All of a sudden, next to the road, the grasses totally disappeared and we were driving next to acres of black rock, which looked like giant cinders. It looked as if a huge fire had taken place, and all that was left was the solid black remnants. Not ash, just chunks everywhere. It was mindboggling. And then we saw the sign, that we had entered the park. As we drove, the landscape was simply like another world. On the right was all the black rock “cinders”, sometimes with lava piles sticking out of it. On the left was the same thing, but beyond that were the mountains, and between them were some green and yellow grasslands. That side was simply gorgeous.
We came to the park loop road entrance at about 7:45 and all around us was black. Not night yet--but the entire ground was black *everywhere*. The white RVs parked in the campground stood out as if they were spotlighted. We drove past the visitor center, which was closed, and went to choose a campsite. Opening the door, I could have sworn I smelled ash and burning, like a fireplace the next morning, but Joe says I am wrong and it doesn’t smell. He also insisted the stuff under our RV and all around us is too hard to smear soot in the RV. It is just a mind-game, I guess; because he’s right, the stuff is like very small black pebbles. It crunches when you walk on it--it is the only ingredient on the ground here! They paved some roads and walkways, but we are parked on this black stuff.
This park is simply like another world! Joe and I agreed, we don’t think it’s at all like what the moon surface is, so that’s kind of a misnomer. But it is absolutely black in this park and it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before. There aren’t even any lights in the campground except from the windows of the campers--PITCH BLACK. We are very excited about exploring it tomorrow. [Note: The almost-full moon came out later when the clouds cleared up a little, so it was suddenly NOT pitch black. But it was an eerie landscape just the same.][Also note: we drove just over 500 miles today, so landscapes was pretty much all we saw! But we did thoroughly enjoy the drive.]