What's new in Idaho?

Saturday, I moved from Pocatello up the road an hour to Idaho Falls. On the way, I stopped at a rest stop that had a sign for a point of geological interest. Turns out it was Hell's Half Acre. Unlike Eastern Oregon's entire canyon, Hell couldn't afford as much in Eastern Idaho. It was actually an area of fairly recent lava flow (4000 years old) that was only lightly covered in soil and vegetation. It was fun to see lava in the middle of Idaho and an interesting stop on a day when I wasn't in a hurry. It was also fun to know that even here, they use the term pahoehoe. What did white people call ropy lava before they found Hawaii?

Had I known how close I was to Craters of the Moon, I would have gone there instead, but I didn't know it was so close until Sunday, and by then I was working. Maybe next time out here.

When I was working on Sunday in Rexburg, I had some time to kill at lunch so I took a ride around town. It took about 9 minutes total. Anyway, I found that they had a BYU campus, and everyone was on the way to the temple. I've seen Mormons before, nothing special there. It just amused me to realize that the entire campus was going to church at the same time. At every other college I've ever been to, the Sunday exodus usually involved a bunch of people with their shirts inside out stumbling home squinting and holding their heads. Not quite the same thing.

I'm in potato land up here. Further down the Snake River Valley, there are also sugar beets, cattle and corn, but up here, it's pretty much just spuds. The place I was working on Monday was in Dubois. (Doo-boys, not Doo-bwah, what are you, foreign? Seriously, that's how they say it.) Dubois had exactly two places to eat. On one side of the road was the Exxon food mart, but on the other side was the Phillips 66 food mart. 66 was much bigger, but not as good as you'd expect. Potato processing plants are interesting. Most food processors work very seasonally, but potatoes can be stored almost a year, so they can be done anytime. Fresh french fries and hash browns all year round. That might mean more if most everything wasn't either dried or frozen before it left the plants.

Today I was working for the nukes at the Idaho National Lab. During the cold war, that place was making bomb parts, but I don't know what they are doing these days. Mainly cleaning up and closing building it looks like, but I'm sure there's something else that I wasn't invited to. Driving out there, you can see the Three Buttes. They're three huge cinder cones that grew up out of an otherwise flat landscape. It was pretty cloudy today though, so I'm guessing it would have been cooler on the weekend when it was sunny and 70 degrees.

It's supposed to snow tonight. 4-8 inches. It snowed a little this afternoon, but then went back to rain. But it's been getting colder all day and should be down below freezing tonight, so we'll see what happens. I'll still probably be able to get around, but the guy working with me was supposed to get over the mountains into Wyoming tonight, and I'm wondering how far he got or whether he'll make it back tomorrow if he did get there.

It's late. I was tired when I got back to the room this evening and took a nap. For 3 hours. So now I'm awake at the wrong time. But morning will still come, so I should at least try to sleep. We'll see how that works out.