Day 6: Boise to Island Park

Life comes at you fast

2 days after the fact I have barely even begun to process all that we saw in our "5 hour drive" across the bottom part of Idaho.  I want to keep this Blog as current as possible, but this has simply not been practical.   We are slowing down the trip and modifying the route as continuing at our current paste will lead to increasing numbers of cascading failures. -- Written from a nice hotel room in Billings MT

 Rainy Day In Boise

We were up late and the Bed n Breakfast was really nice.  The commons had a good spot for me to camp out and type my blog.  Other guests would drift by.  The rain kept falling in a relaxing pattern on our roof.  Also noted the beautiful flow banding present in the "Leathered granite" on the lounge countertops.  Most suppliers of designer countertops are hesitant to reveal their sources and / or explain how / where the rock was quarried.  Even the nomenclature for countertop stone is often wildly out of step with what the professional geology community would name said rock.   For example:  Most "Black Granite" is actually gabbro.  While both are cooled from magmas miles beneath the surface, gabbro has no quartz, a lot more iron, and likely formed at a higher temperature.  This almost looks like a migmatite with the darker minerals keeping solid and bending while the lighter minerals liquified slightly. . .  Uh we need to get on the road now

The B-52's "Your own private Idaho" supposedly describes a state of paranoia and neurosis using the metaphor of a lightly populated rocky mountain state to convey the images in a sound that transcends new-wave, rockabilly, punk and surf rock at the dawn of alternative music.  We felt a bit of this driving I-84 through a summer downpour from Boise to Mountain home.  Idaho drivers have generally been very friendly this trip, but they are fast and the state allows longer bigger trucks than do many places in the US.  In the rain these trucks kick up quite a spray rendering visibility down to almost nothing.  then every now and then someone decides to pass at 20 mph below the speed limit and everyone brakes at once.  The Scariest driver was not from around these parts, but Florida. I spotted them in my rear view mirror and quickly did all I could to assert my refusal to challenge their toxic concept of gender expression.  Very quickly they passed me and were inches off the bumper of a car 100 feet down the highway.  I began bracing for the collision that fortunately did not happen.

Snow in June

From Mountain home we began climbing again through increasingly heavy rain and fog until it was not longer 100 % rain, but snow.  Air obtains most of its heat by contact with the earth surface

Rising air will decompress.   Decompression makes the temperature drop.  In air with anything less than full saturation this is a fully reversible change of state in which energy is neitther added nor lost.  Once air is saturated latent heat will be released into sensible heat as water vapor condenses.  Here at the top of cat

Creek summit the air is cold enough to maintain snow a little above 5000 feet.  s

The Valley in between

The valley we come into has a feel of no land's land, not quite the Rockies, which hide very nearby in misty clouds, but separated from the Snake river plain by a range of hills with no names.  Even up and down are not clear.  Creeks flow perpendicular to the long axis of the valley.  It's amazing how much of this country is places with no sense of fame, just between places . . . beautiful all the same.  We were getting hungry and found a service station that also featured a fast food place.  Nothing like the cuisine of the country.   It was also here that we encountered our first local to be startled by our plates.  Californians hit the big destinations for sure, but we often fly if it's more than 2 states away.  While many "Californicators" have settled the metropolitan Boise area, few have made it out this way.

Craters of the moon

While not the first "Wow" of the day, it was easily the most significant.  Generally speaking volcanic features along the Snake river plain get younger and younger as you head east.  These lavaflows are only a few thousand years old.   In part what we're seeing is several related, but ultimately different means of volcanism.  The Yellowstone "Hotspot" was indeed here ~ a few million years ago, but those eruptions are long buried by more recent events.  Since the passage over the Yellowstone "Plume" further extension and depressurization has taken place allowing for more partial melts of the mantle, mostly Basaltic.

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and 

We did a short hike up a prominent cinder cones.  These tend to form from Gas rich, silica poor magmas and appear to be piles of little rocks some of which fused together.  Gas pressure ejects bits of molten lava that then cool in the air and pile along all sides of the volcanic vent.   While often this results in 

Often, climbing cinder cones is slow going:  the ground gives way underfoot and it's 2 steps forward, 1 step back.  Here the issues was a biting cold wind out the west.  We lingered up at the summit longer than many to take in the intensity of this moment and gaze at the various lava flows.  The vents do form a rough chain parallel to some long buried part of the rift, and other cone of various lava textures are found on all sides.  To the south the lava flows extend into forever.   Rain was approaching and began to fall horizontally.  this had the benefit of diminishing any crowds that might have been there previously, but also inspired our own descent. 

Our last stop in Craters of the moon was a splatter cone, where the lava was touch goopier, but still gassy.  this was a much lower relief feature, easily accessed by a short path.   Inside a lava tube extended to great depths. Apparently this park has some of the deepest lava tubes in the world.  As tectonics continues to rework them, however there are many safety issues with exploration.  Many were in fact closed following a recent earthquake.   we lingered for a brief moment and then moved on.

Snake river plain revisited

As seems often the case we had a lot more ground to cover before our next lodging and promises to keep.  We set out from Arco ID (pictured above) and across the snake river plain.   Quickly we went from mounatains shrouded in mist to an empty bleak plain devoid of much except less impressive examples of the lava forms we had been witnessing earlier.  Indeed the flatness of this, especially the absence of even creeks added to a sense of monotony.  Somewhere we passed the Idaho National laboratory.  All around us fences discouraged any exploration of the lab's grounds.  In the distance to our south, a rhyloite butte reveled our first sighted remnant of the Yellowstone Hot spot track. 

As you look at these, think:  they are the eroded remnants of something that may have looked a bit like modern day Yellowstone 10 million years ago.

 

Island park and the hailstorm

Past Idaho falls we turned north and began a slow climb up one of the forks of the Snake river.  I've not talked a lot about this river, but there is a lot to this relatively young river that cuts so deep into the crust in so many places.  Some of this is due to the relatively recent uplift of its headwaters region, and several spectacular floods in recent geologic history.  We don't pass many of them here.

Climb begins in earnest.   Traffic thins out and proportion of out of state plates increases and then we begin to climb in earnest:  This is the Island Park / Henry's fork Caldera rim - our last major volcano class:  Supervolcano.  These tend to form in continental settings where thick crust is heated by upper mantle activity.  The proportion of magma beneath us is generally low now, but when it passes a critical threshold, the gasses and lavas for 10's of miles around have way of coming out all at once.  No eruption of this manner has been documented, but a few have taken place in the last 100,000 years that were witnessed by our ancestors, and likely resulted in the deaths of many people who might otherwise have been our ancestors.  We are descended from survivors . . . ~

Island park sports lush meadows and pine forests.  As we approach our lodge the rain begins again and then thunder.   By the time we pull in it is hailing.  Here the orogrphic lift has given this storm system a little extra punch and cumulonimbus clouds tower on all sides.  I spend some time detailing how the hail happens here

With the only restaurant near us packed to the gills and understaffed I wander out to cabins area to cook up some tuna past on my camp stove.  While I get rained on, i am also treated to a show light and rainbows unparalleled.  Tomorrow's blog (Yellowstone)  you'll likely see other days updated more rapidly