Day 1 & 2 - Sep 4 & 5, 2010 Last updated: 9/16/10 9:00am PT
This year we went to Yellowstone National Park, located mostly in Wyoming, but it overflows into Montana. We stayed in West Yellowstone, Montana, a town that contains nothing but hotels, restaurants and gas stations. We decided to drive because there really isn’t a close place to land if flying. And the rental car rates were more than the airfare. We put a little over 2000 miles on our car.
On the way to Yellowstone, we decided to stop and see the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. Our first day was about 9 hours on the road, stopping in Yakima, WA for lunch, and Boise, ID for dinner and a place to sleep. The next morning we set out for Craters of the Moon.
Most of the lava fields at Craters of the Moon came from eruptions dating from 15,000 to 2,000 years ago. The interesting thing I learned at the visitor’s center was that the hot spot that is currently under Yellowstone, was under Craters of the Moon 10 to 6 million years ago. The crust of the Earth is shifting so that the hot spot appears to be moving north and east, so don’t buy any property north and east of Yellowstone in the next million years.
A spatter cone, from outside and inside
It was very windy
There are some lava tubes that you can explore, but only one is accessible without a flashlight. That’s where we went.
From Craters of the Moon, we were going to eat dinner in Jackson, WY, but we weren’t hungry when we got there, so we did a quick walk around this very high-end tourist town and continued on to the Grand Tetons.
This is how I picture the “American West” in my head. Hills (or low mountains) in the background with the foreground a vast nothingness of rolling plains of grass, with the bison grazing (bison, not buffalo).
There was supposed to be a ghost town called ‘Mormon Row’ with buildings from 1896-1907. But, some of these building are still in use, I think.
The Grand Tetons and our fat heads
