SE Idaho

Time off for my husband is pretty rare, and time off for him AND our kids AND tolerable weather is even rarer. We wanted to go to Yellowstone today, but they are still having trouble clearing roads of the 25 feet of snow from this winter, and those are naturally the areas we haven't seen yet. Plus, there's rain and snow and storms predicted for that end of the state for the whole holiday weekend. (They were even suggesting bringing extra blankets in your car if you're traveling, just to survive in case you break down in the middle of nowhere--which is pretty much anywhere in Idaho.)

Anyway. So we went to Craters of the Moon, instead. To get there we took the more direct but less traveled road and sort of skirted under the mountains that line the northern border of the Idaho...pan? The SE part, the not-panhandle part. It was pretty.

These are the Centennial Mountains that form the northern border with Montana. They're a bit more imposing than a lot of the mountains I've seen in Wyoming, which are all high elevation, but rather rolling. (Except for the Teton group--but they are different.)



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Craters of the Moon

This is a really interesting place. I'm not sure I would call it beautiful, but it is certainly very, very interesting. SE Idaho has a rift valley under it. I'm not sure if it's caused by the Yellowstone hotspot that traveled under it, or if it's a different event, but it means that large swaths of land have had oozing lava (like the Hawaiian kind) until quite recently. As in, only 2000 years ago. Which in geologic time is about half a second ago. My mom, who was born in Idaho, used to play on the lavas all the time. Sometimes they fell in sinkholes, and that was not so fun. (Actually, it's a wonder they never broke their necks or got bitten by rattlesnakes.) This kind of stuff is near us, too, actually. You'll have fields and fields of farmed land, and then this weird patch of cooled, oozy rock with sagebrush growing on it. The Craters of the Moon bit hasn't gotten quite as far as sagebrush growing on it, though.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the different kinds of lava you can find. I'm sorry I don't remember which is which, as I was also chasing a 2YO. But the main kinds are pahoehoe and aa. (And yes, if you speak German and have a middle grade mind, the aa kind is hilarious. Especially since the whole park does, as the kids kept saying, look like a giant petrified cow patty. Sorry. Returning you to civilization now.)

This stuff is red and really sharp/rough:



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