Long, Strange Trip: Craters of the Moon National Monument

7/23

Editor (Dad)

Today we travelled from the Best Western of Idaho Falls, ID through the Crater of the Moon National Monument via the Goodale cut of the Oregon Trail. We have arrived outside of Boise, just east of the Oregon border at a KOA campground. This morning was spent sleeping in and swimming in the hotel pool. Check out was noon and we didn’t leave a minute early. As mentioned in an earlier blog, we deviated from our plan to camp last night due to the slow recovery of our tandem sicklies. Paul has taken full advantage and has begun eating and is annoying his brothers, sure signs he is feeling better. Carol has decided to call in sick one more day, at this rate Carol will need a vacation from our vacation. Upon departure from the hotel we headed for the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Central Idaho. It was also not part of our original plan but become possible when we hoteled it last night. We didn’t know anything about it but it quickly became a favorite of the boys. It has a weird moonscape that was the result of tremendous lava flows and explosions thousands of years ago. The most exciting part about this was that these flows and explosions left several caves that are free to be explored. This was really cool. We had to get a permit in order to explore but the requirement was not significant, “have you been in a cave since 2005? No, have any of your clothes or shoes been in a cave since 2005? No. This is designed to protect the bats in the caves from exposure to white nose syndrome. The first threecaves were really kind of freaky. They were exactly what you would expect from a cave, cool temperatures, wet, slippery rocks, and pitch black a few feet in from the opening (everyone had a headlamp). You could really feel like a spelunker. We also hiked to the top of Inferno Cone, which is the remnant of the volcano that formed this monument. It is all black cinders and appears like a giant black sand dune in the middle of the monument. In addition to the funky landscape, Craters of the Moon was also the location for Goodale’s cut, which was a northern route of the Oregon Trail established by a mountain man named Goodale. Between 1840 and 1870, 240,000 settlers used this trail to head west into Oregon. Seven out of every 10 wagons heading west went through Craters of the Moon. The black top on Route 20, the route we took to Boise, has been laid directly over the wagon tracks of the Goodale cut. We scrambled a bit for a campsite this evening. At about 8:10pm from a rest stop, we called the Riverside RV Park in Boise. The problem was the site closed at 8pm. We moved on to Meridian KOA and fortunately one site remained. We pulled in around 9pm. This is entirely an RV park adjacent to town. Our tent site is on an RV site which means setting up the tent on rocks but also having easy access to on site water and electric (hence the computer use at midnight, our time). To make it easy on ourselves we stopped at a grocery store and purchased sandwiches for dinner in order to avoid the late night cooking and dish washing. Probably should be turning in, those rocks are calling my name.