Our first night of camping was at the Craters of the Moon National Monument in southern Idaho. We didn’t arrive until 7:30pm and we left relatively early the next morning but we still enjoyed the stop. We drove around the Craters loop road in the fading light and hiked the Craters Trail and the Lava Tube Trail. Vicky and I got up early the next morning and hiked to the self-guided Crater’s Nature Trail, hiked the trail and then hiked back to camp in time to make breakfast.

The first photo is me standing on a rock near the bottom of a large crater. You can’t tell that I’m near the bottom of a crater from the photo as the crater is way too large to be even mostly in a photo from this range. Vicky took it from up near the rim of the crater.

The next photo is one of Andrew’s from the Lava Tube Trail. We saw hundreds of bats flying out of the lava tubes as we were walking around and climbing down into the tubes.

The third photo was the next day on the self-guided trail. The place was rather stark but also had lots of intense color from lichens, mosses, plants and trees. It also had some fabulous twisted and oozing rock flow areas. It’s a geologists paradise.