Craters of the Moon

On our way to fish Silver Creek near Picabo ID, we took a road trip to Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve.  Talk about a unique landscape….wow!   When we first saw the sign welcoming us to the area, we’d already been noticing the landscape dotted with black lava rocks.  As we continued into the Preserve toward the visitor’s center, the landscape changed to something out of a sci-fi movie.

I won’t bore you with all the details about the Preserve, you can read about them here.  However, I would highly encourage anyone driving anywhere near here to stop and tour the area.  If you get a chance, take a guided trip into some of the “caves” which are really lava tubes.  Some are small as in the “Craters” landscape picture above and some are large enough to hike into (or crawl ?).

We had a great volunteer guide who took us into the Indian Tunnel lava tube and showed us around the lava flows.   Who knew there were different kinds of lava flows???  She also convinced us to try out another “cave”, Beauty Cave, which had walls and floors covered with sparkling rocks.

You will notice one of the pictures is of me, popping out of a hole in the ground.  In reality, we’d taken a secondary route out of Indian Tunnel which had us climb over two different sets of fallen lava rocks in the tube (see Barb’s pic), then up about 30 feet and out of a man-hole sized hole.  What we found exciting was that when we climbed out of the hole, we were in the middle of the lava flow, no trail, just some poles about 100′ apart which you had to traverse between to finally get back to the official trail through the area.  The only crazies who did this in our group were Barb and me, along with one other couple out of our tour group.   We’ll be talking about our “off trail” caving adventure for ages.  For now, we hope you enjoy these pics from our “road trip” to the moon.   Ramble On!