One of my bucket list items is to visit all of the National Parks that I can. That also includes National Monuments, as some of them are quite amazing too. On my cross country trip with my son from Oregon to Connecticut, we were heading out of Boise on our way to Grand Teton National Park. Doing a bit of research on Google Maps, I saw that Craters of the Moon National Monument was a short half-hour side trip along the route, so off we went. I wasn't sure what we would find, as I hadn't heard of it before. Turns out that it was a pretty cool place.
The Monument consists of three major lava fields on 400 square miles. All three lava fields are part of the Great Rift of Idaho. I had never heard of this before, but what this means is that there are deep, open, cracks in the ground, some of which are as deep as 800 feet. We didn't have time to go into any of them, but we did manage to walk around and take photos of the area, including this one.