Posted in Travel, Weekly Photo Challenge, tagged Craters of the Moon, Idaho, lava henry david thoreau, pat bean, snake river plains, weekly photo challenge: pathways on September 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” — Henry David Thoreau
One can walk a pathway through 15-million-year-old lava fields at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho's Snake River Plains. -- Photo by Pat Bean
Posted in Nature, Travel, tagged Craters of the Moon, Idaho, Lake Walcott, Mother Nature, Mount St. Helens, volcanoes on October 2, 2010| 1 Comment »
Trails through Craters of the Moon National Monument take one through a dark, angry landscape. Photo by Pat Bean
The huge lava field that spreads out across Southern Idaho’s Snake River Plain was thought to resemble the moon’s surface, hence when the area was designated a national monument in 1924 it was called Craters of the Moon.
While the name remains today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s two-hour walk on the moon’s surface 45 years later showed it was nothing like the moon’s surface. The name stuck, however, just as Junior remains Junior to his parents even when he’s 65 years old.
As I walked across the rugged blue-black lava flow on trails that took me into a world far removed from my daily existence, I couldn’t help but compare this adventure with my recent visit to Mount St. Helens.
Yet even in this harsh landscape, life manages to exist. -- Photo by Pat Bean
Less than two hours away from Lake Walcott State Park, where I was a volunteer campground host, the monument’s strange landscape had called out to me to visit. I answered but found that the dark rugged landscape agitated me. Where viewing St. Helens had been a calming experience, Craters of the Moon, with its twisting, roiling turmoil of anger still visible, reminded me too much of the world we live in today.
A sobering thought pushed itself to the forefront of my brain, telling me that both these dormant volcanoes will probably flow and blow again. As beautiful and as calming as Mother Nature can be to me, I was forced to admit she does have her destructive moods. Sadly, so do we humans.
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Pat Bean is a writer, avid birder, hiker and passionate nature observer with wanderlust in her soul. She spent nine years living and traveling in a small RV. She now lives in Tucson with Scamp, a rescue who was supposed to be a Schnauzer mix but turned out to be a Siberian Husky-Shih Tzu mix who is as stubborn as his owner, her granddaughter says. She was also a journalist for 37 years, and can be reached at patbean@msn.com
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