Here There Be Dragons

Craters of the Moon has more dimensions to it than we can describe.  This morning, August 21, we started our day with a hike up to the spatter cones, and then to cinder cones known as the Big Craters. As we hiked up along the rims, we could imagine the fire and brimstone that must have spewed from them to cover 618 square miles with lava, cinders and volcanic fragments.

We can imagine the hot plasma rising forth from the cones, and it makes us think of scenes from Lord of the Rings, for example, where dragons flew above the infernos as moths circle a flame:

Imagine our surprise as we hiked up to the rim of the first cinder cone, only to see what appeared to be the skeleton of a dragon, prone facing up the inside slope of the cinders, as if having flown too close to the fire and then tried unsuccessfully to escape it, plummeting to the lava-strewn slope still looking as if it will eventually escape upward and away:

Of course, this is the imaginary frame we put the scenery in, but everything around us encouraged it. Here's another photo of the inside of the cone of one of the Big Craters:

This photo offers some scale.  Kathy is on the rim, looking across the caldera to the far side:

In case a hiker gets too casual about these walks, it is important to remember that the last big eruptions in Craters of the Moon occurred about 2,000 years ago, and geologists have determined that another could occur anytime - almost certainly within the next 1,000 years - because eruptions have occurred regularly about every 2,000 years and the system that cause the eruptions in Craters of the Moon is still active many miles underground.

David took an opportunity to scramble down the cindery slope of one of the big craters, and took this photo of Kathy, who herself had come some way down.  Can you spot little Kathy?  The caldera is immense:

Looking out away from the rims of the Big Craters, we could see yet other, smaller craters in the near distance, looking off toward the Pioneer Mountains to the north and west.  The sky was hazy due to smoke drifting southeast from the Beaver Creek Fire that is burning in Sun Valley near Hailey and Ketchum in Idaho, perhaps 40 miles away.

The volcanism occurred along a 53-mile long series of parallel cracks in the Earth's surface called collectively the Great Rift, running northwest to southeast from the Pioneer Mountains toward the Snake River, crossing the Snake River Plain in southeastern Idaho.  This volcanic system is part of the same one that created Yellowstone (which lies not far to the northeast), and indeed this area saw several gigantic eruptions predating the Yellowstone explosion, due to the same great hot spot that causes Yellowstone to be volcanic.

In some of the most recent activity, the Great Rift was the location of spatter cones, seen in the midground in the following photo.  Spatter cones form when liquid rock is ejected by hot gases and, as the rock is ejected, it is torn into irregular globs and falls around the vent, eventually building into a cone.  Since the rock is more like taffy than either solid rock or liquid, it retains some shape as it flies and falls, and because it is soft, it forms irregular shapes when it lands.  Thus, instead of getting the grey dust of ash cones, or the very small pebbles or grit of ash cones, spatter cones have lots of sharp rock "glued" together.  In the following photo, spatter (in the foreground) and cinder cones (in the background) march away to the southeast, and are the markers for the location of the Great Rift.

As the spatter from the cones cooled, it formed an infinite number of shapes, including some lava structures with their own "mini" lava tubes.  Here's Kathy reaching into a mini lava tube to see what critters might be inhabiting it:

As molten rock was ejected from the spatter cones, lava also poured out of the earth and streamed down across the landscape, forming its own hard, insulating surface shell, where it contacted the air.  This resulted in huge networks of underground streams of lava.  In some cases, the lava flowing out of the cones broke off huge chunks of cone and then transported those cone fragments down-gradient by lifting them - with the result that they "floated" "downstream" and ultimately came to rest many miles below where they had broken away from their cones.  Here is one of those fragments:

It doesn't take much imagination to see this rock as a huge dragon, with its volcanic scales, lying broken and exhausted on the cinders - its head pointing to the right, mummified in rock for all ages.  We began to believe that we could see dragons everywhere we looked in these Craters of the Moon.