We wake up to a beautiful new day, have breakfast and head off to Craters of the Moon National Monument, a couple of hours’ drive, south on Route 75 and east on 20. This fantastic landscape is of relatively recent origin, the result of volcanic eruptions just a couple of thousand years ago which produced massive lava flows.
The different kinds of lava flows are described by their Hawaiian names, “pahoehoe” flow producing wrinkles and curves…
and “a’a” flow being characterized by broken lumps with sharp edges.
My first reaction as we approach this place is that it resembles a construction site in hell. An earlier visitor (a couple of hundred years ago) referred to it as “the Devil’s vomit”, a sentiment obviously intended to encourage tourism.
We wander through this lunar landscape in over 90 degree heat, which is intensified by the uninterrupted expanse of black rock and lack of shade.
As a lava flow slows down, its surface may harden while the underlying molten lava continues to move, and when it eventually runs out it can leave behind the network of tunnels and caves with which the Monument is riddled. In some places the overlying crust collapses, providing access to the spaces below.
Watch that first step, it's a lulu.
The “Indian Cave” is one of these tunnels, and its roof has collapsed in several places, opening up beautiful skylights.
You can walk along Indian Cave for several hundred yards between openings, you go down a staircase leading into it at one end and scramble up a rockpile to get out at the other. This is also one way to keep cool – the temperature drops more than twenty degrees as you descend the twenty five feet from the surface to the floor of the cave.
As we climb out of Indian Cave and make our way across the lava beds to the main footpath, Jan’s had enough of the heat and she heads back to the car for some shade. I continue on to have a look at Beauty Cave and the Boy Scout Cave.
Each of these two tunnels has only a single entrance, and you can quickly leave any trace of daylight behind and wander through hundreds of yards of pitch blackness and fascinating formations. Unfortunately I only have a tiny flashlight, so I’m pretty limited in how far I can go and what I can see. And I realize that it’s probably not a great idea for me to be in these caves alone, there’s only the occasional other visitor who may enter them, and my cell phone gets no signal… so caution wins out and I head out to join Jan.
We leave Craters of the Moon behind, and after another couple of hours on the road we’re in Pocatello and find our room at the Best Western Cotton Tree Inn. We wander across the road to The Sandpiper restaurant where we enjoy drinks and an excellent steak dinner. The delicious steak is no surprise, we are, after all, in beef country, and we’ve been sampling steaks since entering North Dakota. But we weren’t expecting to find ourselves having dinner on a narrow strip of sandy pseudo-beach, in the middle of this ski area!
Well, it is called the SANDpiper...