Adventures Of Bill & Chrissy

Leaving Idaho we saw quite a bit of potato harvesting as well as sugar beets.

It wasn't long before we entered the Utah border.


We arrived at our park, Aspen Grove RV Park in Tremonton Utah. Another great park with a pickleball court!

A Pickleball court was the main reason Chrissy chose this park, but this is what the weather is here today.
We had planned on visiting Promontory again as I really enjoyed watching the old steam engines recreate the meeting of the two railroads back in May 1869. I guess we'll pass on that.

This is the first time we've had to use heat in the coach, not just the floor, but it was 45 this morning and looking like it won't warm up much at all.
So we'll sit out the day taking it easy and we'll get to our next park tomorrow.

I forgot to mention that under the Ice Caves is a lava tube that is 38 miles long. The only longer one is in Hawaii which is 41 miles long.

On Tuesday we traveled a couple of hours to see the Craters of the Moon. This is an area of extreme volcanic activity.
A volcano erupted here just 2,000 years ago. It feel prehistoric!

There was a mountain of ash that I decided to climb. Unfortunately you can't see the top from the bottom. It was quite a hike but a fantastic view.

The wind was like that of Pike's Peak. It would nearly blow you over.

It was really like being on the moon!

Chrissy just told me we're paying $32 a night for this great park. Good deal!

On Monday we headed out to see the Shoshone Ice Caves. It's pronounced Show Shone Not Show Shony, BTW. The trip out there was a treat by itself. We passed more hay bales and a couple of cattle yards as well as a meat processing plant. Now it's making sense.
The smell of cows all around and all that hay...

It's not the cows that smell, it's the hay that has passed through the cows...

We finally got to see some potato fields. They use tractor trailers here to haul from the fields.

I have no idea why they are watering the fields when the potato tops are dead. You want dry potatoes from the ground. Wet potatoes rot.

They get a lot of snow here in the south too.

We're still in the presence of the Snake River. The Snake is 1048 miles long and starts north of Jackson Wyoming. It then travels southwest and then northwest through Idaho before reaching Washington and dumping into the Columbia River. It's the largest of the tributaries that feed the Columbia. Of course, the Columbia then dumps into the Pacific Ocean. It's incredible how much recreation and an economic boost this river is wherever it goes.

We got to appreciate the volcanic activity of this area as we drove to the caves. There are thousands of acres of lava everywhere you look.
Idaho is home to several young volcanoes, including the Craters of the Moon, Wapi, Kings Bowl, North and South Robbers, Cerro Grande, Hells Half Acre, and Shoshone lava fields, which we drove through.

We should have taken a picture standing next to these figures to give you a sense of size. The original Cordova People didn't grow very large. In fact they only lived an average of 22 years. The soil they lived on, the food they grew, the dishes and cookware they used which where all volcanic, contained a lot of iron. So they all died of organ failure due to iron poisoning.

The caves themselves are owned by the State and are run under lease to the Shoshone Tribe.

The cave itself was found in 1880 by a couple of young boys hauling water when they found the exit of a water source had ice in it even in the summer. The locals started digging and found the ice cave which was frozen year round. Word spread and soon everyone had ice cold beer in the summer! The cave remained between 22 and 28 degrees year round because of the compression and expansion of it's airflow, similar to a refrigerator. They started extracting ice for local use, then the railroads got wind of it and started to extract ice for their box cars to keep their produce cold all the way to California. Being greedy, they blew open a second hole in the back of the cave in the 1940s so they could get the ice out even quicker. This second hole allowed the air that was previously trapped inside to flow through freely, letting the warm summer air in.
By 1954 the 20,000 tons of ice was all gone.

Coming home from the war, a young man named Russel Robinson was so sad to see all the ice gone and realized what the problem was. He took it upon himself to close the second hole up and the ice began to form again. By 1962 the ice was back. Of course we had refrigeration so there was no need for the ice anymore. Today we see the cave close to what it would have looked like in the early years.
There is a lot of debris from all the blasting. The ice is 30 feet deep!

It was a very interesting day and the evenings here are wonderful. It gets to mid 80s and into the 50s at night. Perfect...
We had a slight shower here overnight, but other than that, we're having a dry trip! We continue to be amazed at what Idaho is.
Idaho, which we thought was flat lands, has 47 peaks over 10,000 feet tall!