Boise & The Craters of the Moon

The hotel breakfast in Burns opened at 6:30 in the morning, and we were there right on time. We left by 8:00 AM, headed for Boise, Idaho. In Boise we had two tasks: 1) to get some Idaho Trader Joe’s bags, and 2) to visit Kathryn Rodgers, an OCC colleague, who abandoned the OC for the great outdoors of Idaho, along with her boyfriend Peter.

We got to Boise around noon and headed for Trader Joe’s, which is right downtown. We both lived in Boise in the fall and winter of 1970, when it was definitely less crowded. The downtown traffic now rivals anything in Southern California. Kathryn, who now teaches at Boise State University, has a house close to downtown, and mostly rides her bike everywhere.

We met at Tin Roof Tacos (which was good and inexpensive), and spent the afternoon catching up with Kathryn and getting to know Peter. Like OCC, Boise State’s enrollment has declined for Computer Science majors. This whole year, all of her classes are online, so she only needs to go to the campus for the weekly department meeting. Also like OCC, she’s doing a lot of work, designing her classes to make sure that the students are engaged in the age of AI.

Finally, she really seems to be enjoying herself; she is teaching several exercise classes at two gyms, and she and Peter are really taking advantage of the outdoors. On Thursday, for instance, they are going rafting on the Snake River. We also got to see pictures of both of them hang gliding from the town of Murren in Switzerland down into the Lauterbrunnen Valley. 

In Boise we stayed at the Hyatt Place/Town Center, where we had a wonderful room. This was only two blocks from the Shiloh House where we both lived in the fall of 1970. We drove by and found that the old, early 1900’s farmhouse was gone, and a modern dental practice building had taken its place. For dinner, we went to Jersey Mike’s, got a Philadelphia Cheese Steak sandwich to share, took it back to our room, and spent the evening reading. Not night owls, the Gilberts.

Craters of the Moon

Thursday was another long driving day. We were at the hotel breakfast before 6:30. (We both thought that it was excellent; if you’re in Boise, we recommend it.) Our first stop was the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preservation Area. 

The Monument consists of recent lava beds (within the last two thousand years). It’s interesting to think that these lava beds are younger than the Sequoias that we saw last week. There is a nice driving loop, with handicap-accessible paved trails, elevated over the lava flows. The monoliths behind Kathy are crater fragments rafted to their location by the lava flows.

Each trail is signed and marked, explaining the different kinds of lava, cinder cones, and so on. For instance, the smooth ropy lava shown below is called pahoehoe. (A lot of the lava vocabulary is in Hawaiian, since that’s where we have the most consistent, contemporary lava flows.)

The pahoehoe lava also comes in several different varieties. I liked the slab-like one below best. It almost looks like ancient Cuneiform tablets.

We stayed at Craters of the Moon until about 1:00 PM, and then set out for West Yellowstone, where we’ll spend the night. The first town we drove through, Arco, Idaho, is famous for being the first town to be entirely powered by nuclear energy, for one hour, on July 17th, 1955. I had originally planned to spend the night there. Kathy told me she was happy we didn’t. 

Tomorrow, we’re driving through Yellowstone to Cody, Wyoming. See you all there.