Idaho

There is interesting country along the back roads of Idaho and one can see this is definitely mountain terrain.  From a once prosperous gold mining area to a little cattle ranching, now firms offering river rafting trips everywhere you look, you can see that younger people have taken over from the prospectors.  Like Whistler, the occasional ski town has a 4 season focus by adding mountain biking, golf and mansion building (as in Sun Valley).

Taking a bypass from Boise we headed towards Craters of the Moon, a 750,000 acre National Monument that the Shoshone Indians passed through on their annual migration.  The volcanic activity here dates back 15,000 years and the most recent was as early as 2000 years ago.  There was never a massive volcanic eruption but vast volumes of lava flowed from a series of deep fissures.  The lunar astronauts trained here in 1969 and now a small part is open to the public via a 7 mile driving loop that winds through the park, taking you to areas of different lava.  There are examples of the dried flows, spatter cones, cinder cones, projectiles, and if we wanted to hike in 7 miles, we could also see some of the lava tubes and caves.  The following photos are a few examples of what we have seen in the past few days.

Snake Warning

Sawtooth Mountains

National Monument

Road Built over the Flows

Rope-Like Twists

Projectiles

A Cinder Cone We Climbed