The Craters of The Moon National Monument. In the sixties NASA decided to use this huge expanse of lava as a test site for landing on the moon. Today 95% of the area is an undeveloped wilderness of hard lava that many would probably call a wasteland. But once you get out from the visitor center and leave the sinuous, perfect National Park style blacktop behind, a landscape of limber pine, sagebrush and some rare wild flowers reveals itself.
Here lava cooled so fast that the ripples hardened before flattening out. There are areas of seemingly slick rock lumpy, wavy, and flowing like a river in places. There are basins where lava seeped into and extensive caves given away sometimes by a small crack in the ground. The caves are old lava tubes where magma flushed under the ground like trains through a subway system, leaving behind cooled hollows that are now a maze of caverns.
We managed to find one set of caves that I'm sure is frequented by a lot of tourists. But nevertheless it required a semi belly crawl to enter, opening into a damp, spacious cavern we could walk into in some places. My room mate Kyung and another friend named Mike made the trip as well.
This was far from spelunking but good fun anyhow.
Kyung atop some blue tinted magma flows. There were some tree molds in this area that looked like fence post holes in the lava that had never been filled. The lava surrounded the trees, burnt them to disintegration and cooled to leave hollows in their place.
This is what I love about Idaho. We came here on an afternoon after work and were in bed by eleven with an incredible set of images to remember.
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