Life on the Road with June and Dave: Craters of the Moon

Today we explored Craters of the Moon National Monument.

We started with the North Crater Trail. This was a 3 mile hike around the top of a crater and through some lava field. Many of the rocks were super light due to the abundance of air pockets in them. Dave showed off his strength lifting various sizes of these rocks.

I found the trees quite interesting as well with their twisted bark from the wind or the drift wood it became with all it’s twists and turns showing the weather it endured.

Other picks from this trail.

The next trail was the spatter cones. These were smaller cones that you could go and look in and see how deep they were. There was one I saw five hats in from people leaning over to take a picture and lost their hat.

The hat hole

We then went to the inferno cone. The interesting thing about this one was it was just cinder from an eruption a mile or so away and it just landed and created this large hill. There is no crater when you get to the top, just flat land with plants and cinder.

The final walk was the lava tunnels. These are caves that were created by lava flows. The length of them depended on when the lava stopped flowing. There were ones that had collapsed that were along the trail. One fell in like a soufflé, the other the rocks just fell in.

This trail is where you really go to see the expanse and why they call it Craters of the Moon. Fun fact: NASA has used Craters of the Moon for research. In 1969 Apollo astronauts and scientists came to Craters of the Moon to study the volcanic landscape in preparation for their moon landing. Nasa scientists still use Craters of the Moon to conduct field experiments and to test procedures that may one day be used by astronauts on Mars.

We went into Indian Tunnel. This one had several openings in the top so you could see how interesting it was. There was a way that you could go through and come out the other side, but we were not able to find it. You had to climb over a pile of rocks, which I did, but then on the other side there were several openings with no real indicator of which way to go. So I got my rock climbing in and then we went back the way we came in. Enjoy the pics.