This was a good picture of LIFE continuing from the barreness of a flow of lava.Tuesday June 19th: We decided to take a drive over to the Craters of the Moon National Monument today. The drive was about 100 miles each way, but really worth the time. The drive itself gave us a better idea about Idaho, or at least this area of the state. The road was arrow straight and flat as we were in the Snake river basin. Vocanic cones sprout up from the level ground and a mountain range gets closer as we drive westward. We curve around to the south by Arco, ID and go another 25 miles to the NM entrance. This was apparently one area, out of many that was home to the hot spot shallow area in the earths surface. They traced the origion of the hotspot from the Oregon/Idaho border up to its current location at Yellowstone. None of the areas are completely dead though many erupt again over the next several thousand years. We walked several of the trails that were throughout the park and had lunch at a really nice area under a house sized hunk of lava and shaded by a tree. A good sized chipmonk kept us company and posed for several pictures. He was rewarded with a couple of pieces of bread that he seemed to really appreciate. I hiked up a volcano to the top and took a number of panoramic pictures from there. Boy, I felt each of my 64 years and each of the 6000 feet altitude before reaching the top. A short while later we walked up a "splatter hole" volcano and went down inside the cone for a view. They apparently get about three to five feet of snow here each year so a lot is closed from October through April.
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