Eastern Idaho's Prairies and Craters of the Moon National Monument

A butte of Idaho

We rode out along the Peaks-to-Craters scenic byway, Highway 26, along scrub, wheat-colored grasses and the sagebrush of the arid land. On these apparently barren sage meadows pronghorn deer, marmots, coyotes and foxes dwell invisibly. More than 400 species of plants shelter 250 wildlife species here, including elk. Buttes rise up like phantoms, sometimes with antennae on them, remnants of volcanoes from several thousand years past, or of hot magma that has bulged out through the earth's surface, pink and hazy purple, on tawny green prairie.

Sage prairie

We drove past the Idaho Nuclear Laboratory (the Department of Energy's leading research and development site in nuclear) that lit up the town of Arco, pop about 1,0000 on July 17, 1955. It was the first town in the free world to be served by electrical energy developed from the atom. Since 1949 over 50 nuclear reactors have been built on this plain, more than anywhere else in the world. Their purpose is peaceful.

Our hosts in Idaho Falls (a home exchange though we were coexisting this time) both had nuclear engineer fathers. George was born and raised in Idaho--his mother taught in a handsome stone grade school which is now boarded up. Now George is the superintendant of schools, a thoughtful educator and advocate of progressive project-based high schools, and an outdoors guy. He and Nancy talk with regret of how nuclear energy held so much promise, but it's been Europeans who have taken the ball and run with it. "We do store nuclear waste here in Idaho," they mentioned. "Sort of controversial?" I asked. "Not at all," they said. They credit the state of culture in Idaho Falls--an art museum, a symphony---to the nuclear scientists who have moved there.

Signs along the road told us that mammoths were hunted here 12,000 years ago, and have been found in men's stomachs. 8,000 years ago bison were hunted, and fed the Indians till they disappeared or till the Indians were chased away. Native American hunting and gathering parties have left behind stone tools, ancient campsites and pictographs. Tribal members continue to work with the Idaho National Laboratory Site to protect resources.

And we saw more evidence of the earth's active fire beneath, of the moving earth, advancing southwest over hot magma, creating the Snake River Valley in a series of eruptions beginning 17 million years ago.

Craters of the Moon National Monument is a lunar landscape of lava that has erupted over millions of years over the Great Rift, a line of volcanic activity perpendicular to the Snake River Valley. The lava has been transformed into pumice and different kinds of basalt: pahoehoe, a smooth snaky flow frozen in time, and a'a rock, also named in Hawaiian from the way you shout when you try to walk on its rough hard surface. The hot turbulent past has jumbled into caves and pillars, subterranean tubes and rugged walls of volcanoes that had been transported by lava.

Two thousand years ago, nearby volcanoes tore themselves apart and sent rivers of lava with chunks of craters to a section of the park called Devil's Garden, after a visiting minister declared the jumble of barren rock and twisted trees a garden fit for the devil himself. With time, seeds of brabbitbrush and limber pine took root in the sparse soil. Dwarf mistletoe, a parasitic plant called witch's broom in these parts, took over many of the pines, choking off nutrition from branches in chaotic snarls. Forest rangers of the early 20th c. took it upon themselves to poison, burn and destroy the unsightly twisted pines that were besieged by witch's broom. Thousands of trees were destroyed. Now signs along Devil's Garden pose the question: what is natural? What should be eliminated? Both limber pine (so named because its suppleness enables it to thrive in the most hostile conditions) and dwarf mistletoe are native to this place, and their interaction is no more unnatural than the distorted rock themselves. A walk through the Devil's Garden poses the ecologists's puzzles and tragedies.

We walked up a high cinder cone where later we watched tiny figures climb the stark black silhouette. Then we peered into the burned pits of small scatter volcanoes when it began to storm, a windy squall the likes of which we'd experienced at Yellowstone, so we ended our visit, while a chipmunk peered out at us from beneath a tree root.

It is in this unlikely region that Basque shepherds have settled for the past century. Their sheep roam over the steppes that cover the basalt. But the last shepherds are departing, and only a few stalwarts, who live in tin-roofed wagons without water or electricity, maintain the Basque herds and serve wonderful Basque food.

The Northern Shoshone used to pass through annually on their way to the Camas Prairie, leaving behind rock structures and stone circles. Even the astronauts of the 60's came to Craters of the Moon to learn volcanic geology from its medley of barren rock. A little boy wrote, on visiting: