Today we started out for Flaming Gorge which is on the border of Wyoming and Utah.  We never made it.  We stopped along the way at Fossil Butte National Monument.  Fifty million years ago Fossil Lake teemed with life.  Since then lake sediments have turned to limestone which entombs the remains of plants and animals.  To find them thin rock layers are split like the pages in a stone book.  It's hard to believe that this dry and arid land could ever have been under water but the evidence proves it was--millions of years ago.

The layer below the white top .of this butte is where fossils are being found

Another view of the area.

Incidentally the difference between a National Monument and a National Park is that the President can designate a National Monument.  It takes an act of congress to establish a National Park!

8/24/12

Today we visited Craters of the Moon National Monument near Arco, ID.  It's like nothing I ever saw before - created by volcanic activity thousands of years ago.  It covers a vast area of which we saw only a little.  We saw cinder cones, spatter cones, lava tubes and caves which are really lava tubes that gave opened up.  The area temperatures range as high as 150 degrees F in summer and -20 degrees in the winter.  It was very windy and apparently often is.  It is very dry (we saw tumbleweed race across the road in front of us as we approached the Monument) and, at least on this day, almost cool.  You would think nothing could grow or live in that environment but it does.  There are limber pines and plants of varying types.  Among the animals that live there are chipmunks, ground squirrels, yellow bellied marmots, pack rats and pikas.  A truly fascinating place across which some of those hardy Oregon Trail folks traveled.  Native Americans have lived and crossed the area for eons and believe it is a sacred place.

Cinder cone about 600' high that we walked up

Spatter cone

Snow cone

Indian Cave (collapsed lava tube)

8/23/12

From Baker City, OR we drove to Boise, ID and again marveled at the dryness of the land unless relieved by irrigation.  It appears that water showers the land from morning till night.  At least in Idaho, the crops include wheat, alfalfa, corn, sugar beets and onions.  

We visited the Idaho State Penitentiary in Boise.  It was first occupied in 1873 and remained in operation until 1974.  A number of the buildings were added by using prison labor to build them.  A totally separate building, ringed with a 12' wall, housed the women.  In 1976, the penitentiary was added to the National Registry.

A unique aspect of this prison was its rose gardens

Prison walls and guards post

8/22/12

We left the campsite, and on the advise of another camper and an Oregon City resident who volunteers at the SP, we traveled to Baker City to visit the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center there.  One can't imagine the hardships those early settlers must have faced and overcome.  The land around the Center was probably typical for too much of the trek:  dry, dusty land covered with sagebrush and grasses.  Only where there was a river, would the area be treed and green.  Can you imagine leaving your family and most of your possessions behind to take off in a covered wagon into the unknown? I can't.

Depiction of a wagon train

A typical wagon on the Oregon Trail

Today at least some of the landscape is relieved by acres and acres of wheat, corn, alfalfa under cultivation because the land is irrigated.