Day 16 - Idaho Falls to Boise

Up and packed the car by 8.30am. Got onto the Interstate and drove 30 minutes to the town of Blackfoot. I have a friend in the collecting club nicknamed Blackfoot and I wanted to get a few photos with the name in it.

Once there I hit the button for attractions on the GPS and the Idaho Potato Museum. Well you got to go and check that out don’t you?

Once inside as you would expect there is a history of potatoes. Some interesting items including a potato peeler and a potato masher collection.

Also some old horse drawn farm equipment.

And to my great excitement a small collection of old Pringles Chips Tubes. As most would know I collect Pringles tubes and of the ones on display I only have two of them. So it gives me an idea of what I need to keep looking for.

Also the worlds largest potato chip, of course made by Pringles factory workers.

Form Blackfoot I drove north towards the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. I was going to be a two plus hour drive.

Along the way I saw a sign for the town of Atomic City. Sounded interesting so I turned into the roadway to it and drove on in. It was a town created for the near by Atomic Energy power plant built in the world. On December 21, 1951 the power plant produced the first usable electricity using atomic energy.

The town now has 29 residents but was at one stage in the 1960’s had about 150 people living there.

It has a speedway that holds races during the summer. 

Leaving there  I traveled further north to the EBR-I Atomic Museum. It was here on December 21, 1951 that the power plant produced the first usable electricity using atomic energy. They lit up a string of 4 electric light bulbs.

Then from the next day until it closed in 1964 it produced enough energy to run the whole plant whenever the reactor was working.

A tour guide walked us around the building showing us all the different sections of the plant and explaining how the reactor worked.

Some funny things that happened included on the first day they produced power the staff all wrote their names in chalk high on a wall to commemorate the event. It is still there behind glass for everyone to see. Although there is one extra name, cause they left at the end of the day the night cleaner climbed up on the ladder and put his name there as well. It is still there with the other names.

Interesting is a plaque on the wall representing the visit of President Lyndon B Johnson to the plant when he dedicated the retired plant onto the National Historic Landmark register. This happened on 25th of August 1966, which is 50 years ago today!!

After leaving the plant I drove to the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve.  Today is the 100th Birthday of the world’s first National Park being dedicated at Yellowstone National Park. That’s interesting that those two events happened 50 years apart on the same day.

The area was dedicated as a national monument in 1924 after federal geologists explored the area in 1901 and again in 1923. Earlier the first white men travelled through the area in the 1850s as the traditional western Oregon Trail routes were closed after conflicts between wagon trains and Indians. An explorer named Goodale established this route which was known as Goodale’s Cutoff.

The area was created by lava flows after volcanic eruptions, the most recent of these being only 2000 years ago. It was described as looking like the craters on the moon by geologist Harold T Stearns in 1923.

There is a loop road in the park to drive around and places to stop to walk amongst the lava fields. 

There are many walks to do including a walk called the Inferno Cone. It is a 400 yard walk up a steep incline up a sand type lava dust.

There is also a cave area created by the crust of the lava cooling and the hot lava lowering below this. These caves are homes to many species of bats. It is definitely a different landscape to anything I have seen before.

By the time I left the park it was 2.30pm and I set the GPS for Boise and followed the ladies voice there. I drove along Highway 20, through farmland and across mountain ranges until it hit Interstate 84 and followed it into Boise.

I had booked accommodation earlier in the day online so I went straight to it and unloaded before going to an Applebee’s restaurant for dinner and then back to the room to edit the many photos I took today.