Short Stops: Camping in a Moonscape

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It’s Here at Idaho’s Craters of the Moon

It was a weird scene greeting settlers on the Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s as their wagon trains approached a plain in what would become central Idaho. Something those travelers who’d been on a journey for weeks, wondering by then when it would end, indeed wasn’t prepared for.

They must have stared slack-jawed at their first view of other-worldly cinder cones dotting an otherwise barren landscape wrinkled with jagged and folded lava flows yards thick. Only a few weeds and a wild sunflower or two grew here and there for miles. Most areas had no water or soil—only sharp red-black rock. You could hardly blame them for treating this as a bookmark on their journey before the next grassland, which was oddly not far off.

A century after those wagons creaked past, the scene remains unchanged, except for a few highways that now carry 21st-century travelers, including us, visiting Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. We were on our journey past for the third or fourth time, this time in our 2023 Wonder Murphy Bed Lounge Lucky Us Too. A few decades ago, Apollo astronauts headed to the moon trained here. It’s that stark and similar, they thought then, to the lunar surface.

You can also have that same experience—and even camp amongst the rock and volcanic formations—on a visit to Craters of the Moon, which celebrated its 100th anniversary as part of the National Park Service (NPS) in 2024.

It will take you at least a day to explore this weird park roughly the size of Rhode Island, and much of it is inaccessible to your LTV. Luckily, however, you can see this 1,100-square-mile piece of earth that also is home to the Great Rift, North America’s newest and deepest-known slice in the earth’s crust, and get a good idea of what’s available in the areas you can see, but can’t get to, by driving the park’s paved road system.

Stops along the way include a hike up a cinder cone, a hike into the earth in a lava tube, and short walks to overlooks and peeks into smaller cones that hold ice and snow nearly year-round, all while the seeming endless lava-encrusted moonscape around you endures mid-summer heat in the triple-digits.

We’ll shorten Craters Of The Moon to Craters from now on–it may not look like it, but it is one of the NPS’s largest. It’s located 18 miles from the small desert town of Arco, which holds the distinction of being the first city in the Free World to be lit by atomic power in 1955, which came from what was then the Argonne National Laboratory-West and is now the Idaho National Laboratory.

Since the INL works with stuff ranging from nasty and secret to energy research, having this landscape with nothing for miles is good. Going through it, you won’t see much except signs announcing it’s there, and that’s on purpose. There is a small museum, which is the only place you’re welcome to. It’s also good that it’s so far from anything. In 1961, it was the site of a human-error-caused explosion at a prototype low-level reactor that killed three workers.

You’re close when the layers of lava start appearing next to U.S. Highway 20/26/93. Those three national highways on one strip of asphalt should also tell you something about their remoteness. The lava you see is geologically young, ranging from 2,000 to 15,000 years, and scientists believe the rift remains active. This means more lava beneath you could bubble up someday. Drive up a hill, and you’re at the visitor center and campground, set amidst volcanic rock heaved up by eruptions and pushed into piles by flowing molten rock.

You’ll want to drive the seven-mile Loop Road, which takes you to the monument’s most notable features, starting with the North Crater Flow. Depending on the air temperature—in the mid-to-high 90s on our most recent visit—the .3-mile trail is a manageable taste of what you’ll see on the 1.8-miler nearby.

Walk with your water bottle companion on at least the short trail to experience the sheer weight of the surrounding nothingness and everything all at once. Except for clumps of grasses and tumbleweed sprouted here and there, your imagination bends from the weight of what you’re seeing, probably what much of our home planet looked like a few billion years ago. Barren plains of volcanic magma flipped, piled, floated, and tossed about as far as you can see, where everything you see elsewhere on the planet sprang from—life at its beginning and now, in an astounding juxtaposition.

If the weather allows, climb the trail of Inferno Cone to view more cinder cones along the Great Rift, the largest, deepest, and most recent volcanic-caused rift in the continental U.S.

However, we chose not to bake in the heat on the walk and took the short wheelchair-accessible trail to a series of spatter cones, miniature volcanoes that include the one cone that, even in mid-summer, has ice inside. There’s also an extensive area of lava tubes—created when molten lava is crusted above, forming a natural cave. You must have a permit to enter any of them so the NPS knows where you’ll be if any issues arise.