May 13…. To the moon Alice!

We’ve been visiting Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve for the last several days. I’ve always wanted to come here, been close a few times, but it never worked out. Well, now it finally did and here we are.

It’s…. ok.

Starting 15,000 years ago, continuing off and on till about 2000 years ago, the landscape in this part of Idaho just spewed lava. Not quite a traditional volcano for the most part, but a crack in the earth that just oozed. Called The Great Rift, it stretched for over 50 miles, erupting, spewing, leaking molten rock into the air. A lot of the lava was very gassy, so as it came up, it bubbled and sputtered and spattered, throwing out cinders and bits and bombs across the landscape. Huge mounds of cinders in places, big enough to look kinda like a regular volcano but technically not.

Stretching for mile after mile, lava flows cover the ground. The park is over 750,000 acres. It took us over 30 minutes at 65mph to get from one side to the other. Huge!

So many different kinds of lava, there’s the flowing kind, and lava tubes and caves, there’s ropy lava and broken domes. Something called Blue Dragon lava, with a distinct blue color to it. Interesting tidbit, all of the names for the different kinds of lava in the park are taken from the Hawaiian language. I guess they know lava better than most.

It’s all very interesting, and beautiful in an odd way. Black lava desolation for mile after mile. We went on a number of hikes through the park, and saw a lot of different lava types and formations… but at the end of the day, after you’ve seen one ancient lava flow, that’s pretty much it. It all starts to look the same. We almost didn’t go back on the third day, but just needed to get outside and do something, so there we went.

If you’re ever in the area, and have never seen such an expanse of cinders and lava formations, go see it. Or if you collect national parks and monuments and need to check it off your list, then go. But if you’ve already been to a volcano or lava field somewhere else, you might want to give it a pass.