Idaho Pics

I've tried to put these pictures up several times, but Blogger acted like it took them and then gave me the stupid red X boxes. Anyway, better late than never. These are a few of the cool things I saw in Idaho. Lots of potatoes, but this stuff too.

This is the Snake River Canyon from just under the bridge to Twin Falls, Idaho. I'm sure it wasn't at this spot, but this is the canyon that Evel Knievel jumped in the 70's. The green spots you can see on either side of the river are golf courses. My co-worker that was with me in September was drooling over these, but he didn't get a chance to play them. The best thing about this canyon is that you don't suspect it until you are right over it. This part of the Snake River Valley is really, REALLY flat, so you are going along a very flat very straight road and then BAM, you're over this crazy deep canyon. Very cool.

This is Shoshone Falls, a couple miles upriver from the picture above. Most of the snow had yet to melt when I was there, so most of the flow was going through that power station on the left. For comparison, that building is several stories high. During the late spring and early summer, all the rocks on the right are covered by the waterfall. The pictures I've seen look very impressive, but I've never been there at the right time.

This was a tree growing out of the lava at Hell's Half Acre, the geological point of interest at the rest stop on the way to Idaho Falls. The lava is pretty thick and is only about 4000 years old, so only really hardy things have grown over it so far. These trees are relatively old, but they apparently have a rough life. I'm sure the cold of winter and the hot dry of summer make for tough living in a place with no flowing water and no wind shelter.

This is the dam at the falls in Idaho Falls. The dam runs about a quarter mile along the length of the river to divert water through a power station at the lower end of the falls. It was very windy on the day I was there and the waves running along the river held together as they went over the falls. The lines you can see above looked like they were running along the face of the dam. It was very cool. I took a video with the camera I had, but it had a hard time focusing, so it isn't very impressive. This picture will have to do.

This is old fish hatchery in Idaho Falls. Now it's part of a park on an island between the river and the power plant diversion canal. It's also a graffiti gallery. I've seen better. Some of the stuff is concrete, but a lot of it is made out of local stone, which in this case is lava rocks. I've only seen construction like that in Hawaii, so it was interesting and unexpected.

There. I had a few other pics that might have made it too, but Blogger gave me enough trouble with these, so they'll have to do.

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.