Craters Part II

Buried in lava! Ha!

What a beautiful thing to wake up inside a National Park, surrounded by super cool things!! :)  We all got up, ate breakfast, and headed over to the visitor's center in order to get the kids their Lunar Rangers booklets and see what they had there.  I found some super cool volcano books for school, and a headlamp which I've always wanted and has become invaluable to me.

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We headed into orbit (the Craters of the Moon loop).  We climbed the Inferno Cone--a super cool small dome that had NO growth on it except for one big tree at the top.  The whole thing was covered in black cinder rocks that were SO pretty!  The glittered with gold and silver!  Who knew cinders were so beautiful?  We all really enjoyed climbing up and seeing such a beautiful panoramic view!

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We climbed to the top of a couple of 'spatter cones'.  These are little volcanoes that just 'spatter' cinders out of them and make these cute little volcanoes that look like 'real' volcanoes as we are shown them.

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Our next fun adventure was a Ranger led hike through this HUGE lava flow to these lava tube caves!  We learned all about the flow and the caves and how they formed.  It was so fascinating!  The kids LOVED climbing through the caves.  Some parts were some serious spelunking...

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We decided to drive at night to Salmon--almost died!  SO SCARY!  The whole town was out of power due to some storm that had thrown most of the area into darkness.  We were following the GPS to this RV park, but since there were no street lights, it was rather hard to see.  We missed a turn off, so Devin was turning around.  He thought he was turning into the parking lot of a filling station, but just in the nick of time, I looked up and forward and saw that we were NOT driving into a parking lot, but straight into a river off the side of a bridge with no guard rail!!!  OH MY GOSH!!!  I screamed until Devin finally stopped and thought I was going to have a heart attack as I imagined us continuing that last foot into a gorge.  I still panic just thinking about it.  More terrifying than climbing a volcano.  At least the kids were all sleeping at this point.  I would hate to have had them all freak out.

We managed to find the park, and lucked out that not only had the power come on just a moment previous, but the owner of the park was standing outside, which was good because we had no idea where we were!  The owner was really nice and helped us hook everything up so we could have a nice sleep.  Thank goodness.

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