Craters of the Moon

Black lava stretches to the horizon in frozen waves, buckled and cracked, as if the earth convulsed and then stopped breathing. The silence at Craters of the Moon in central Idaho is absolute — no birdsong, no running water, just wind scraping basalt. Occasionally the ground opens into a lava tube, and you descend into caves formed by rivers of molten rock 2,000 years ago.

Craters of the Moon National Monument preserves 618 square miles of volcanic landscape along the Great Rift, a series of deep fissures in the Earth's crust. The most recent eruptions occurred roughly 2,100 years ago, and geologists expect future eruptions within the next thousand years — this is a dormant system, not an extinct one. The terrain was so otherworldly that NASA sent Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell here in 1969 to train for the lunar surface. They practised identifying volcanic features and navigating terrain with no familiar landmarks. The monument contains over twenty-five accessible lava tubes, cinder cones, spatter cones, and vast fields of pahoehoe and aa lava. Despite the seemingly lifeless appearance, over 750 plant species and 280 wildlife species survive here, adapted to the harsh basalt environment.