Bairnhess RV Adventures: Suckers for Lava and Waterfalls

Challis, ID Sept 3 - 7, 2013

We picked Challis as a good stopping point between Glacier and Yellowstone and because the RV park touted all kinds of amenities and things to do. Well Challis is a very small town literally in the middle of nowhere. It is surrounded by beautiful hills though. The couple that run the park are very talkative and there are lots of wide open spaces for the dogs and cats to roam. The small town grocery store was actually really nice with a great selection of fresh produce and pretty much everything else we needed.

View from our front door

We had heard great things about the Craters of the Moon National Park which was about an hour and a half away so we made the drive. The drive was beautiful and the NP was definitely worth it We even saw our first moose! Craters of the Moon is an ocean of lava flows with scattered islands of cinder cones and sagebrush. The lava landscape is the result of periodic eruptions along the Great Rift, a chain of cracks and fissures nearly 52 miles long running north to south through the monument. A series of Hawaiian-style eruptions over the past 15,000 years has produced lava tubes, cinder cones, and a variety of lava flows influenced by the viscosity of the lava. All of it is visible from the 7 mile loop road through the park. We also took a 2 mile hike up, around, and through the freshest lava on the Snake River Plain.

Drive to craters, a sedimentary limestone canyon. Notice that the right side of the road has been uplifted but not the right side.

Lava toes occur when the lava running through a lava tube puts increased pressure on the roof of the tube, it forces the crust upward causing it to bend and buckle. The rounded, bulbous projections of lava that escaped from this ridge are the lava toes.

"Peek a boo"

Can you see the blue tint on the surface of the lava flow? This is due to the presence of titanium. It reacts with the oxygen in the atmosphere and creates that blue sheen. This lava flow is known as Blue Dragon as the surface reminded the early explorers of dragon skin. I guess there were quite a few dragons in the area long ago! :) The flow is only 2,100 years old.

Cinder cone. These cinders were actually blown in from a volcanic eruption that occurred 100 yards away. The wind was blowing SW and this is where the eruptive cinders ended up.

Mother nature finds a way bitterroot flowers growing in the cinders

Globs of molten rock are thrown out of a volcanic fissure. This is a Breadcrust Bomb, they have an outer crust that cracks and develops like a loaf of bread when the surface cools quickly and the hot interior continues to expand. They weigh well over 100 pounds.

Very fluid flowing lava forms smooth, rope like Pahoehoe (pa-hoy-hoy) lava.

More Pahoehoe, you can really see the rope like appearance.

"The Great Rift" lava flow. When thicker, more viscous lava emerges, rubble like, crusty 'A'a lava forms.

This is the Blue Dragon Lava Flow, filled with the blue titanium lava from above

Believe it or not this is NOT a volcano! It is a massive dome of Rhyolite rock. Rhyolite is composed of the same minerals as granite (which forms from cooling magma underground). Rhyolite forms from lava which cools on the surface, so the mineral grains are much smaller than granite. About 300,000 years ago rhyolite lava slowly rose up through the layers of dark basalt and broke through to the surface to form this peak.

This is a Spindle Bomb that form as hot lava spirals through the air, freezing into twisted shapes.

This is called a flow ridge. Crusts of cooling lava develop on the surface of a lava flow when the hot lava comes in contact with cool air. The crust encapsulates the hot, flowing lava below creating a roof. This is the roof of what was once a lava tube. When the pressure in the lava tube increases, it forces the roof crust upward making it buckle. It is out of this flow ridge that lava toes ooze from once the lava in the tube has diminished and slowed down.

This is a cracked open lava tube. You can see the remains of the lava on the floor of the tube.

Another view into the lava tube. The rubble in front of the pic is from the collapsed roof of the lava tube. You can also see where the flowing lava has scarred the wall of the tube.

Another view of the same lava tube exposed due to the collapsed roof.

Roof of lava tube. The pits you see are where molten lava dripped down into the lava flowing through the tube as flow rate decreased.

This is the big picture of the entire lava tube, it was huge. All the rubble in the middle is the collapsed roof of what was once was a single gigantic flowing river of lava under one roof.

Buffalo "cave", not a cave at all just exposed rooms of another collapsed lava tube.

This is us on the way home from Craters of the Moon. Zero visibility, I would have pulled over but we were the only ones left on the road.

This is us 10 minutes later. A full rainbow, you could see both ends. We thought about driving to pick up the pot of gold.

On our last day we drove the Custer Motorway, a 38 mile gravel road following an old mining trail from Challis to Custer. It was a slow drive, but beautiful with lots of historic stops. We then continued on thru Stanley into the Sawtooth Recreation area for a beautiful hike around Petit Lake.