Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve, Idaho, United States
I know I was at Craters of the Moon National Monument once
before on a whirlwind weekend drive to Idaho in 1994 when I lived in Denver,
but as best I can recall I only stopped at the highway overlooks and didn’t
venture into the park. Thus, actually exploring it has been high on my agenda
from road trip travels for a while. The monument’s claim to fame is extensive volcanic
scenery – lava flows, cinder cones, tube caves, etc. The geology of southern
Idaho’s Snake River plain is volcanic, as over the more recent millions of
years in geologic time the volcanic hotspot has gradually moved east across the
region to its current place beneath Yellowstone National Park.
The national monument is actually not that big and can be
fully explored in a day with several short trails leaving from spots along the
park’s seven-mile loop road to explore cinder cones, lave flows, and other
geologic features. To be quite honest,
it’s a lot of the same stuff I saw about six months ago in Hawaii Volcanoes
National Park on the Big Island, except without the tropical plants.
The other
difference is that there is, of course, no recent volcanic activity at Craters
of the Moon.
My Idaho Hiking guidebook listed a longer hike option at
Craters of the Moon into the wilderness in the preserve which was expanded
under President Clinton. The 10-mile
round trip to Echo Crater and Sentinel Buttes was mostly flat and pretty easy,
more of a long march on a trail that in some places was wide enough to almost
be a road. I enjoy varied scenery and
topography but after this and several hikes on the plains in eastern Montana in
May, I’m ready for some more rugged country.
I honestly know even less about astronomy than I do about
geology. A few days earlier, though, I read something about a significantly
larger full moon appearing rising at dusk on July fourth. Coincidentally, I was
in Arco, the nearest town to Craters of the Moon the night before, and noticed
it stunningly rising as I was looking for a place to car camp somewhere around
the edge of town for the night. It
really was impressive…and then followed by several hours of official and
unofficial fireworks around town.
2025-05-22