Rain, wind, and hail…  It rained all night, with snow higher up.  We visited with other tourists over breakfast, then headed south, with the idea of touring Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve near Arco, Idaho.  Intermittent rain and drizzle characterized this day of travel.  Not the shortest route, but parts I hadn’t been on (Judy had been to the Craters before).

We lunched in Arco, stopping by a city park featuring the sail from USS Hawkbill (SSN-666), a Sturgeon class attack submarine similar to many I had worked on back in the 1970s. Submarines have a relatively short useful life: after a certain number of deep dives, they are retired, the de-fueled reactors stored at the Hanford Reservation in Eastern Washington, and the hulls cut up for scrap. A few of the distinctive sail structures wind up in parks like this one. Arco is significant because the U.S. Navy nuclear power program started here, at the nearby Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.

Then on to the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, encompassing a small part of one of the extensive lava fields that cover much of central Idaho, the result of a “hot spot” of magma over which the North American tectonic plate has moved westward over the past 14 million years, with periodic outflows similar to the ones experienced on the Big Island of Hawaii over the past several decades. The CotM area has flows of different ages, and a variety of lava types. Lava is brittle, so visitors are restricted to specific roads and trails within the Monument. It was cold, windy, and rainy, so we didn’t explore too far from the car, though a sun break permitted a 1.2km loop hike in a relatively flat area, though we did tackle a few short, steep trails to peer into the two large spatter cones that are open to the public.

Moving on, we continued south on U.S. 93 to Twin Falls, crossing the Snake River Canyon into town to get our first coffee of the day (at 1600!) and top off the tank at Costco, having learned our lesson on fuel management the day before, and headed off east on I-84, with few fuel stops, in increasingly heavier rain squalls and high crosswinds. As we turned onto I-15 at Tremonton, UT, we were battered by hail, which piled up 8cm deep on the hood where the windshield wipers scooped it. Circling to the north around the mountains to Logan, we again drove into the storm, thankfully nearly hail-free. Arriving at our lodging for the night, we took advantage of the shelter of the check-in portico to inspect the bicycle, clamped on top of the car: no damage was visible, and the seats seemed to be still intact after extended peening with the hail, which, fortunately, was fairly slushy, shattering on impact. Some worry about water forced into bearings, and the seats thoroughly soaked, but we’ll have to deal with that when we’re ready to ride. The weather service predicts more thunderstorms  for Friday along our route, so we’ll no doubt get wetter before we get dried out.