Craters of the Moon National Monument

Ted and I hiked up a trail in an otherworldly, volcanic landscape. Certainly, some of the formations could have been the spine and ribs of a mythic serpent that had coiled so tightly around a mountain in a thunderstorm that the rocks melted (Clark, Ella, Indian Legends in the Northern Rockies, 193-194).
The molten lava killed the serpent and flowed over the land, creating iridescent surfaces, black mounds, spatter cones, deep caves, and lava tubes.
We were on the Tree Mold Trail in the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. The molds were charred imprints of trees incinerated by the long-ago lava.
Now, centuries later, limber pines, sagebrush, and even flowers grew along the side of the trail, so on our way back, I stopped to take photos.
I was huffing to catch up with Ted when he stopped and started chatting with a stranger.
Tall and a little rotund, the man was wearing sunglasses, a ball cap, camouflaged hoodie, and tan shorts.
When I finally came abreast of them, I heard Ted ask where he was from. “Kansas.”
“Great place,” my hubby said. “That’s where my wife’s from.”
The man turned to look at me. “Where in Kansas?”
“It’s a small farming community,” I said, catching my breath, “so you probably haven’t heard of it - Minneapolis.”
“You’ve got to be kidding! That’s where I’m from!”
It was my turn to be amazed. I scrutinized him, but I didn’t recognize him, not surprising since I hadn’t lived on the farm since I was a teenager.
Still, to meet someone hiking the lava fields in Idaho, far from Kansas, seemed a bizarre coincidence. Or was it?
A few days earlier, as we drove from Wyoming into Idaho, a truck passed us and kicked up a rock which bulleted into our windshield. Within 30 minutes, tenacles spread five or six inches long.
We’d planned to stop in Idaho Falls anyway and attend church in nearby Ririe with our friends who had recently moved there. As we pulled into Idaho Falls, smoke filled the air, and we soon learned the Big Rock Fire had started near Ririe.
Massive fires also burned in Oregon, Washington, and Canada as well as some still smoldering in the Southwest.
The next morning at church, people shared their experiences of helping family and neighbors evacuate, including transporting livestock to safety.
Many talked about their grief over the devastation of their beloved stomping grounds.
Our hearts went out to them because we knew exactly what they were feeling. After church, despite a stiff wind and the fire, we spent a wonderful afternoon with our friends before heading back to Idaho Falls.
On Monday, we drove to a windshield replacement business. The receptionist and technicians were very kind. In fact, we felt like we’d met new friends, especially when the receptionist shared her life story, but our windshield was beyond repair.
They ordered a new one, which they said would be there on Tuesday. With time on our hands, we set out to visit the Craters of the Moon, a volcanic area along the Great Rift.
The Great Rift, according to the Bureau of Land Management, is the largest (635 square miles) and deepest (800 feet in places) volcanic rift in the contiguous United States, erupting last about 2,000 years ago.
The Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve is part of the Great Rift lava fields.
The Shoshone-Bannock people traversed those lava fields for centuries and probably witnessed the last eruption. The Shoshone originated from the Northern Shoshone tribe, and the Bannock people were Northern Paiute.
Culturally related, the two tribes hunted and lived together even though they spoke different dialects.
According to modern tribal members, “Our ancestors bore witness to the geological transformations of this land, observing the ebb and flow of nature’s forces with reverence and understanding.
“We call the land of the lava flows and buttes . . . Tennambo’i. Translated as ‘Antelope’s Trail,’ Tennambo’i evokes the journey of our people guided by Tenna, the antelope, through the fiery landscapes of waihya ogwaide, the flowing fire, thousands of years ago”
We don’t know if the Euro-Americans who traveled through the Great Rift on their way to Oregon in the mid-1800’s felt the same reverence for the land, but probably not since they described it as “black vomit” or the “Devil’s Playground.”
However, in the 1920’s, Robert Limbert hiked the Great Rift three times, calling it the Craters of the Moon in a National Geographic article and advocating for its preservation.
More than a century later, on the way back from the tree molds, we met the man from my hometown. Soon, the rest of his party caught up with him, including his wife, his sister, and her husband.
The two women had also been born and raised in Minneapolis, and we soon learned that they knew my nephew and his two sons very well.
Since we’d been in Minneapolis just a few days earlier, enjoying an ice cream social with my beloved family, meeting the hometown boy on the trail seemed as surreal as the landscape.
Since then, I’ve contemplated the experiences that funneled into that moment on the trail: A cracked windshield, new and old friends, the Big Rock Fire, people helping their neighbors, a mythic serpent that created the volcanic fields, the
Shoshone-Bannock’s reverence for the landscape, and meeting strangers from my hometown.
Fire itself is a multi-layered symbol of destruction, purification, and transformation. It can also be a symbol of spiritual illumination.
For me, the illumination is best encapsulated in a quote by Eckhart Tolle: “In the stillness . . . you can feel your own . . . timeless reality. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature.
“This is the realization of oneness. This is love.”
Or maybe my hubby says it even better: “The best thing about our adventures are the people we meet along the way.”