UFO Talk Radio

Beep beep..crackle. It was recently confirmed by five supposedly reliable sources that an unidentified flying object has been sighted. The object is reported to be a bright yellow light pulsing in the sky. Wait, this just in - the object has split, and now two objects, one square and one triangular are heading toward the horizon.They have vanished. Ladies and gentlemen, this is surely proof that UFOs exist. Crackle...chhhhhhh

Over the hill the radio announcer's voice faded into a shower of static. I looked at John, John looked at me and we both followed the sign ahead as it passed to the back and out of sight. "Welcome to Crater's of the Moon".

Quiet a welcoming to this strange jagged land of cinder crags, breadcrust bombs and spatter cones. A land of ropey pleats of pahoehoe lava and crusty impassible miles of a'a.

The sun was casting a golden glow over the Idaho hills when we pulled into the moon's only campground and set up house. I looked out our front window at piles of spikey lava and watched for a hovering saucer. Nothing, perhaps we would be visited later. Perhaps that lone twisted ghost tree stretching her witch's broom hands into space, was an alien beckoning her homeworld.

But if a spaceship ever landed, I can't tell you. My upper lids hit the lower ones by 9:30. If late in the night, a wide-eyed alien did pay us a visit, maybe to perform scientific experiments, I have no recollection of the event. Too bad, that would have made an interesting journal entry.

We awoke the next morning feeling refreshed and oddly renewed (hmmm?) and headed for the first stop on Crater's moon loop, Devil's Orchard. Here a sea of cinder crags well up from the ground. These crags were once cinder cones that broke off and flowed away in a river of magma. These molten rivers flowed with tremendous force and created the snake-like strands of pahoehoe lava that wound and twisted at our feet. As the rivers cooled, their movement slowed. The thickening goo formed the jagged formations of a'a lava that covers most of the 83 square miles in this monument. A'a is a Hawaiian word meaning 'hard on the feet'.

After the orchard we drove to the spatter cones. Earth that was once rested 37 miles below us now rises in huge cones toward the sky.

Craters, lava encrusted caves, tree molds,and a seemingly endless desert made up the rest of the moon. Finally by 5:30, we pulled away from its gravitational pull and headed back to highway 93 - back to earth....beep beep, crackle....chhhhh.