While staying in Idaho Falls we took a drive over to an area known as Craters of the Moon.  It’s an area where there were volcanic eruptions and lava flows every 2,000 years or so from about 16,000 years ago to the latest about 2,100 years ago.  The area contains cinder cones (large conical hills made of black or red cinder rocks), spatter cones (small cones between 10-20 feet high and fairly vertical made of lava that spatters straight up and falls back onto a small area), lava flows and cinder fields.  It’s very interesting to walk among the volcanic material and see all the shapes, flows and colors – in addition to the most common black and fairly common red, there area also areas of blue lava!

A large swath of Idaho following the path of the Snake River is known as the Great Rift, which has seen lots of volcanic activity for thousands of years.  The volcanic activity over these thousands of years has moved northeast and currently Yellowstone is the ‘hot spot’ in the Great Rift.

Here are pictures we took while at the Craters of the Moon: