One of the things I have gotten so far is that Idaho's identity seems intensely about the land. For starters, Idaho seems to be mostly protected land. The Forest Service seems to own quite a lot of the whole state, and a lot of the state is just EMPTY and unspoiled. Much of the center of the state is protected wilderness, and there are parts you can't even drive through. You have to drive around it or go through it on foot or on a boat. So the open land and rivers are wilder than comparable areas in other places, and that seems to be a big part of Idaho's identity. It is an outdoors life. The areas near the wilderness don't seem to be very organized around tourists, either, in comparison to other "resort" parts of the country we have been to. We just spent a week in the Sawtooth Mountains, and it was remarkable how relatively little is going on there in terms of tourist services. People are just living their lives in beautiful empty places. (This is not true of course in the beautiful Ketchum/Sun Valley
area, which is stunning and beautiful, and obviously quite ready for company.)
At Craters of the Moon National Park
One of the places we visited in Idaho is a place you might not have heard about. I certainly hadn't. It's a National Park called Craters of the Moon. It's a very large area, acres and acres, of what was left after a big volcano eruption. I haven't been to Hawaii, and we stupidly didn't visit Mt St Helens
when we went from Oregon into Washington, so much of what we saw there is new to me. We went on a hike led by a Park Ranger, and there are many self guided hikes there as well. Every possible kind of volcanic rock is there, and although they will happily tell you that this one is this kind, and this one is that kind, the truth is that when we see it in a huge field, it just looks like every kind of pile of mud. Or rock. Or worse, piles of excrement. But it is very interesting up close, and even better when genuinely explored. We found out that when lava is flowing under the surface like a river, there are sometimes "tubes" created that are like tunnels for the lava to flow through, like a hose. When the river finishes passing through, or the flowing stops, sometimes it leaves a tunnel under the
ground. These are called "lava tubes."
This is how one gets down in the hole. See the ladder? Then there is a lot of scrambling over rocks
Lava fields
More and different lava fields
They are really like underground caves. You have to get permission to go into them, and to do that you have to have not been in a cave somewhere else in the last few years, because this white nose disease is killing off all the bats, and they are afraid you will bring some equipment or tools with you that have been in a cave where bats are sick, and then bring the disease to a new place. Anyway, we went with a Ranger inside one of these caves, and it was really interesting. One of the coolest parts is that sometimes after the cave, or tube, is created, the ceiling collapses. Sometimes it does it when the whole thing is still hot. That looks just like a fallen soufflé. If it happens after it's all cool, big chunks of the ceiling are on the ground, and when you look at them, you can see how they used to be ceiling. (One man's ceiling is another man's floor.) Really cool. I think it is one of our favorite places that we have visited, and we could have easily driven right past.
You can't really see it here but that big wedge on the ground exactly matches a hole in the ceiling
You climb over a million rocks and then suddenly there is a hole and there is the sky again!
Miles of this. From the road it looks like nothing. Up close.....amazing.
Everything in central Idaho relates to Lewis and Clark. Staying on the Salmon River, you hear about them everywhere. We followed a piece of their actual trail, which is a pretty rutted and winding road. But it was wonderful, and at the top you are rewarded with standing on top of the Continental Divide, where you can have one foot in Idaho and one in Montana, and you can see what they saw. When they got to the top of the pass, they were expecting to see the Columbia River valley, and the path to the Pacific. What they saw instead was the Sawtooth range of the Rockies. Wow.
On the Lewis and Clark Trail
Sawtooth Wilderness
We have now been in many parts of Idaho. Earlier, we went through the very top corner of Idaho, the panhandle, which has a quite wonderful, artsy sort of town called Sandpoint, but which otherwise has been described to us as redneck to a maximum degree. (Idaho is a red state through and through, but somehow that part of the state stands out, I guess.) We have seen the Craters of the Moon; spent a few days in Salmon, which is a very nice small town, where we saw Shakespeare in the park, learned about Sacajawea (she was from the Salmon River valley), took a day-long float trip on the Salmon River, and stood on the Continental Divide. We spent a few days in Stanley, which has only 63 people but is at the edge of the Sawtooth Wilderness, and where Bob did a lot of fishing, we had amazing barbecue, and which is frequently the coldest spot in the US. Tonight we are in Twin Falls, where we were told to be sure to stop and see a waterfall deeper than Niagara, but which is mostly dry now, at the end of summer, because it is a regulated dam.
Not sure I totally got a feel for Idaho, but I can say the scenery is spectacular, the people were warm and friendly, and there is a lot of true wilderness. Three cheers for Idaho Senator Frank Church, who spent his life making sure this would be true.
Tomorrow we head into Utah briefly, and then east to Wyoming. 20,000 miles in, and still going.
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