For a moment there I had a deja vu when I started thinking about this blog post: volcanoes, eruptions, lava flow and big rocks – I distinctly remember writing about them already. Ah, yes, in my LAST blog post about Lassen Volcanic NP. In the 5 days since then we have made it along the “Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway” from Northern California to Oregon, and now to another site in Idaho. This is at least our 3rd Crater experience (not that I’m keeping track or anything), and I was sure when we set out to Craters of the Moon NM it would be just a smaller, less impressive version of more of the same. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t! And another heads up: while I took lots of pictures, somehow they just don’t do it justice. I’m not a big fan of rocks in general, but this experience made me reconsider. As the parks website explains: “Craters of the Moon lava field, the largest of the three fields found along the Great Rift, is made up of about 60 lava flows and 25 volcanic cones that cover 618 square miles. It provides outstanding examples of how molten basaltic rock can solidify into various types of lava.”
Craters of the Moon is very aptly named. It is a completely different kind of universe. Everything seemed alien. Even the more familiar mountainscape and the flora seemed out of place. However, the experiences of walking over basalt that made crunching sounds under your feet like nothing you’ve ever heard, of looking at colors that subtly seemed to expand the known color spectrum, and of smelling the hot landscape and knowing this is nothing like the heat (and stink) of its creation – it just didn’t seem possible to venture into this kind of place on this planet.
Considering we still had to drive about 4 hours to our next destination, we kept the hikes to just the short loops. And though these were already grand, it felt a bit like shortchanging the place and I would think it would be amazing to take on some of the longer trails sometime in fall. In fact, we discovered that we were too early in other parks as well: in Lassen Volcanic we couldn’t drive the highway through the park and at Crater Lake weren’t able to ride the boat to Wizard Island, because these parks deal with 40+ feet of snow that doesn’t disappear until late July and thus many activities are limited until that time. Snow is not the issue at Craters of the Moon – it would be more fun later in the year, because the cooled down and now very solid lava flows can heat up to 150 degrees in the summer. Thus we to lucky with the weather once again: it was overcast and with a slight breeze that made it very manageable to hike.
We picked three major sites: the North Crater Flow Trail, the Inferno Cone trail, and the Spatter Cones trails. From a hike perspective, the Inferno Cone was best: a nice steep ascent and a very rewarding 360 degree view from up top. To understand how lava comes out of the ground, the Spatter Cones were great – you could see down into the core over 100 feet (they’re the way your average person imagines a volcano). However, my favorite by far was the flow trail. The colors! The textures! The shapes! The flora! And did I mention the colors?!?
The experience left me quite speechless (and unwilling to take more pictures – although our drive to Grand Teton took us through very spectacular scenery along the Snake River and then we ooh’d and aah’d some more on our approach to the Park). At the visitor center we had learned that CoM is one of two places in the US with active Basalt flows – the result of eruptions from 15000 to 2000 years ago – and the closest thing to studying similar eruptions that created the basalt brought back from the moon.
BaresNation 
Nice to see genuine appreciation of father nature ( mother nature tears things apart) . Fascinating. Great writing. Good that everybody is healthy, injury free ( except a few bruises ). Keep on trunkin…….
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Eva, I enjoyed your synopsis of the park. Parts of it remind me of some of the areas on the Big Island of Hawaii.
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