Idaho: Craters of the Moon National Monument

🌋 Craters of the Moon, Idaho — Lava, Heat, and a Pandemic

We were on our way back from a road trip to Minnesota, heading home to Central Oregon, when we found ourselves cutting through eastern Idaho. Now, eastern Idaho is not exactly the kind of place that makes you slam on the brakes in excitement — it’s mostly flat, dusty, and goes on for rather longer than feels strictly necessary. But there, sitting on our itinerary between Idaho Falls and the state capital, Boise, was Craters of the Moon National Monument, and we thought we’d have a look.

We should say, living in Central Oregon as we do, we are not exactly strangers to volcanic landscapes. We’ve got cinder buttes, lava fields, and lava tube caves more or less on our doorstep. So you might reasonably wonder why we’d drive out of our way to see more of the same. And honestly, that’s a fair point. But can you ever have too much of a lava field? Apparently not, because off we went.

📜 A Bit of History Worth Knowing

Craters of the Moon is, to put it plainly, a vast ocean of solidified lava flows with scattered islands of cinder cones poking up through the sagebrush. It looks, as the name rather cleverly suggests, like somewhere Apollo astronauts might have trained — and indeed, some of them did, in 1969, before heading off to the actual Moon. Whether that made them feel better or worse about the real thing, I couldn’t say.

The Monument was formally established on 2nd May 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge signed the proclamation protecting this rather extraordinary piece of American geology. It sat largely as it was for decades — a bit of a forgotten corner of the American West, frankly — until November 2000, when President Clinton issued a presidential proclamation that dramatically expanded the protected area. Then in August 2002, the expanded 410,000-acre National Park Service portion was formally designated as Craters of the Moon National Preserve. All told, the Monument and Preserve together now encompass three major lava fields and roughly 400 square miles of sagebrush steppe grasslands, covering a total area of 1,117 square miles. The Monument alone accounts for 343,000 acres. That’s a lot of lava, by anyone’s reckoning.

What makes it all the more remarkable is that the 60 distinct solidified lava flows forming the Craters of the Moon Lava Field range in age from around 15,000 years old down to just 2,000 years — which, in geological terms, is practically last Tuesday.

☀️ Arriving in July — What Could Possibly Go Wrong

We timed our arrival for earlier in the day, largely because this part of the world is brutally exposed to the elements and visiting in July means the afternoon sun is not so much warm as aggressively hostile. We managed to beat the worst of the heat, but it was still toasty enough that sensible people would have stayed in the car.

We rolled into the car park outside the visitor centre to find it was something of a ghost town. This is a genuinely remote area at the best of times, and even in a normal year I suspect the passing footfall is not exactly overwhelming. But this was 2020, the year of the pandemic, and things were quieter than a church mouse at midnight. The visitor centre was operating under strict Covid-19 restrictions — only a handful of visitors allowed inside at any one time. So we gave that a miss and fell back on talking to the rangers who had been posted outside under a pop-up canopy in the blazing sun. You really did have to feel for them. These are people whose normal working day involves sitting inside a perfectly good air-conditioned building, and here they were, baking away cheerfully in the heat for the benefit of people like us. Still, they were helpful and good-natured about the whole thing, and we gave our America the Beautiful lifelong National Parks pass a quick flash and headed in.

🥾 Around the Loop — Including a Hill We Probably Shouldn’t Have Climbed

Our route through the park required very little planning. The lava tube caves were completely off-limits owing to the pandemic — apparently bats, caves, and respiratory viruses are not a combination anyone was keen to encourage — so we settled for driving the loop road, which takes you past a series of stops where you can get out and stretch your legs along a hiking trail or two. You can see the full route on the map below.

We pulled over at a few spots along the way to take photographs. Then we came to Inferno Cone — a cinder cone with a gloriously ominous name that it absolutely lives up to. Almost completely devoid of vegetation, it rises steeply to a summit at 6,181 feet. We looked at it. It looked back at us. And then, because we are the sort of people who apparently can’t help ourselves, we decided to climb it.

We do live at altitude back in Oregon, which helps. But we are not, and this is the uncomfortable truth, as young or as fit as we once were. The slope up Inferno Cone is steep and exposed and there is absolutely nothing to hold onto. By the time we reached the top we were huffing and puffing in a way that would have been embarrassing had there been anyone else around to witness it. Fortunately, there wasn’t. The views from the summit, however, were genuinely spectacular — a sweeping panorama of black lava fields stretching away in every direction, punctuated by the odd cinder cone. It was worth every wheeze.

We took our photos, noted that the top of Inferno Cone is about as exposed as anywhere we’ve ever stood, and then made our way back down rather more quickly than we went up. The air conditioning in the car was running at full blast before we’d even buckled our seatbelts.

We completed the loop, drove back out through the sagebrush, and rejoined the highway heading west.

💬 Was It Worth It?

If you haven’t seen much in the way of lava fields and you’ve got even a passing interest in geology, Craters of the Moon is absolutely worth a stop if you’re making your way across Idaho. It’s remote, it’s hot, it’s strange and oddly beautiful — and if nothing else, climbing Inferno Cone gives you a story to tell. Just perhaps don’t attempt it in the middle of the afternoon in July.