Day 17-Idaho
We visited Craters of the Moon in April a couple years ago and it was still covered by four feet of snow. We were allowed to hike in as far as we wanted on the main driving road which turned out to be not very far because the wind was blowing hard and it was freezing, and most of the park was covered in snow, as I mentioned. So we said we would return again in the summer some day and this was it. It’s an eerie sort of place with lava fields all around and it’s so quiet that we could hear the wind blowing. Not blowing vegetation, just blowing. We saw great examples of aa and pahoehoe types of basalt and lots of interesting features. Scott the geologist was in his element. He was explaining faults and rock types and squeeze-ups and I don’t know what all to me and it was great!
There are several cinder cones there which are created from the small cinders that fall from a huge volcanic incident. One cone is extremely large and visitors are allowed to climb its very steep sides to the top where there is vegetation growing. Did I mention that it’s very steep? We felt like we were walking straight up, and even all the miles and miles of hiking we had done didn’t get us in shape for that climb. The view from the top was awesome, however, as we could see all over the park.
We visited the Snowcone area where there is a cinder cone with a hole that is filled with ice all year long. Scott went farther on the crater trail there and I hung out in the parking lot reading the park book so I could regale Scott with fascinating facts. That was the only hike I didn’t go on so I managed pretty dang well on this trip, thank you very much! Although Scott tried hard to help me reserve energy and not get too worn out each day.
Next we hiked the Tree Molds Trail which went pretty far out in a lava field but was so interesting. Trees were overcome with hot lava and burned, but the lava cooled and preserved the shape and texture of the trees in the cooled rock.
We really loved seeing Craters of the Moon and enjoyed our visit to this spectacular area.
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