I worked in partnership with Visit Idaho to create this Travel Tip for their website.
Miles before arriving at the visitor center at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, a field of hardened lava appeared south of the highway. At first, my husband and I debated whether it was actually lava or just a shadow of a cloud across the land. Having been to Craters several times before, I knew it was the beginning of a volcanic wonderland.
The landscape at Craters of the Moon was created by a handful of lava flows over time. The lava here didn’t erupt out of volcanoes, but rather oozed out of fissures in the earth and occasionally spewed out of vents. Sometimes a flow would partially cover a previous lava bed, other times it would create new ones. The result is 618 square miles (not all in the National Monument) of cinder cones, lava tubes, tree molds, lava rivers, spatter cones, and lava beds as far as you can see.
I keep coming back to Craters of the Moon because it feels like a place like no other; it’s “out of this world,” as they say. I couldn’t wait to share it with my husband, who had never been, and our two boys, who were too young to remember our last visit.
Read the rest of the story on the Visit Idaho site.