Idaho - Day 13 - to Idaho Falls

Snake River RV Park, Idaho Falls

Wednesday, 13 July 2022

today's route

The campground I was leaving was almost in the middle of Arco, so I decided to drive through town once more on my way east.

Butte County Courthouse -
this building is smaller than it looks from this angle.

Masonic Temple above a Coldwell Banker office -
note the 1916 date on the building.

Not far down the road past Butte City, pop. 74, I came to a turn to get to "INL - Changing the World's Energy Future" and another turn for "EBR-1 - Atomic Museum Historical Site." 

None of this meant anything to me so I looked it up and learned that "EBR-1" stands for Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1, while "INL" stands for Idaho National Laboratory, which claims to be the country's "lead nuclear energy research and development laboratory."  What they don't say is that it was once the site of the world's first (and the US's only) fatal reactor accident.  It happened in 1961, and apparently even Idahoans don't necessarily know about it.  I found several accounts of it, but I think this one explains what happened more clearly than the others do.  It's a pretty strange story.   https://timeline.com/first-nuclear-accident

The road took me by 2 mountains standing near each other.  The one that looked taller had an almost smooth dome shape.  The other looked like it had been a volcano that blew its top and was left with a caldera.  That one, that looked lower, was bristling with communications towers stuck all over its top like a pincushion.  The other one had no towers at all.

As far as I could tell from a couple of historical markers nearby, the one covered with towers is called Big Butte and I guess is actually taller, at 2,500' high.  It's composed of 2 domes created by 2 rounds of molten rock, with one following the other (geologically speaking), about 300,000 years ago.  The dome without towers I think is named East Butte and was created by molten rock that rose up through a volcanic fissure, though the maker describes Middle Butte as having a similar appearance, so who knows which is which.  The historical markers in Idaho try to be helpful, but they don't have pictures of the things they're referring to so it's hard for me to figure out which of the poke-y-up things I'm looking at is the one they're referring to.

The land in this area wasn't exactly flat, but there was no relief other than a few isolated mountains on the horizon.  Think desert states rather than plains states.

Litter cleanup in this area was sponsored by "To Honor All Who Defend My Freedom."

I passed a historical marker titled "Elephant Hunters," which sounded truly bizarre out here and I was sorry I couldn't stop and go back to see it.  So I looked it up and here's what it said:

Early day big game hunters who occupied lava caves around here more than 12,000 years ago had a diet that included elephants, camels and giant bison.

When a gradual change to a warmer, drier climate made local grasslands into more desert their elephant herds left for cooler plains farther north.  But 8,000 years ago, bison still were available here.  Indians continued to hunt buffalo on these plains until about 1840.  Then they had to go to Montana for their plains hunting trips.

Honestly, I find this really hard to believe.  I remember hearing about some military group that brought camels over to Arizona or somewhere a century or two ago, but this sign suggests they were roaming around this area on their own long before that.  And do you suppose by "elephants" they mean some descendent of the dinosaurs that lived here?  Anyway, that's what the sign said.

I've been noticing that people around here seem to have planted windbreaks, with rows and clumps of trees surrounding houses.

In land that was being irrigated, I saw acres of crops that looked like grain.  And I saw lots of bee boxes near what seemed to be fields of canola.

Idaho has A LOT of horses.  I may have said that before, but I'm continually struck by how many and how often I see them along the way.  I never thought of Idaho as a horse state, but I've completely revamped my view on that.

And I passed large potato fields before coming into Idaho Falls, pop. 61,076.  It wasn't even noon when we got there, which I figured was too early to try to check into tonight's campground, so I went looking the falls of Idaho Falls fame.

They were easy to find since they seem to run right through the middle of town.  There's a nice walking trail alongside the falls, which run for some distance. 

The falls here aren't just one single cascade from a height, but instead are a long series of water flowing over rocks in a river.  But the river has undergone changes because of flooding and the need for electricity sources, and though the flow of water over the rocks hasn't changed since nature stuck the rocks there, the amount of water has been greatly increased by a dam.  But this dam isn't a tall one like Hoover Dam or Grand Coulee Dam.  Instead - well, take a look for yourself.

That long smooth line you see between the water-over-the-rocks area and the shoreline
behind is the dam.

And I took a video of the flow - but I should explain that the video is only a small portion of the falls.  Each of the photos above was taken at a different location along that walking path, and the video was taken from still another location.  They stretch a long way.

There was some art along the path, and here's a sample:

a momma bear and her 2 cubs -
but not as fully developed as the moose above

Can you see the little "bird" flying through the branches?

And there was a local historical marker:

see enlarged text at right

text of the marker at left

When I finally managed to tear myself away from the falls, we found the campground only a few miles down the street, with the road running alongside the Snake River as it flowed toward the dam.

The campground was vigorously watering much of its grounds - including the muddy campsite they first sent me to.  I almost got stuck in the mud trying to back into that site and finally went back to the office and asked to be moved.  Which they were happy to do (and I wondered why they'd stuck me with that one in the first place if there were others so readily available).

Anyway, I've gotten into the habit of taking out the little level I have - you know, the thing that's got an air bubble in liquid to tell you if something's level or not - and putting it on the table to see how far off we are and if there's any adjustment I can make in where I park that will fix it.  That requires me clambering over the stack of dog beds between the 2 front seats to see what the little (about 2" long) level says, then clambering back again to make adjustments.  I've learned that I can't just use it by the driver's seat, because what's level there may not be level at all 24' back.

So there I was clambering back and forth, and one of those times I jammed my little toe into the console that sticks out between the seats.  I've done that before, but this time it REALLY hurt.  A lot.  A whole lot.  And then I found I couldn't put any weight on that foot - at all.  So that meant I was going to have a hard time doing almost anything, let alone walking Dexter.  I hopped back into the cabin and managed to connect my laptop to the campground's wifi and looked up nearby clinics.  I found one that was only a few miles back down the same road I'd used to get to the campground, so that's where I headed.

Only it turned out I couldn't use that foot even to push the gas pedal, let alone the brakes - I had to use my left foot instead.  Well, my left foot didn't have the muscle memory that would tell it how much pressure to use, so I ended up doing jackrabbit starts and sudden dead stops.  Dexter didn't like it, and I apologized, but I mostly saved my energy to get us to the clinic without causing a wreck or something.

Once there (and parking was an experience with my left foot), I found I was having a hard time hopping to the front door.  Turns out at my age and overweight condition, hopping is a lot harder than I remember it being from when I was a kid.  I was clearly out of practice.  I hopped while I could find some piece of the RV to hold onto, but I was just a second away from flopping down on my hands and knees and crawling into the clinic on my all-fours when one of the employees came out with a wheelchair.

It took a while, but several x-rays later a doctor told me I'd dislocated my little toe (she showed me the pictures), so she pulled it back into position and the staff wrapped it to the next toe with paper tape and said to take it easy for a couple of weeks.  Thank goodness I hadn't broken it, which would have entailed a walking boot and crutches and so forth, according to the doctor.  That would have made driving down to Pocatello the next day pretty tough, and I needed to get down there to get my brakes fixed.  So I really got lucky.

I found out when I got back to the campground that putting that toe back into the position it was supposed to be in took away almost 100% of the pain.  I could walk on it no problem, which I did because Dext really needed to get out, after he'd had to wait so long through the medical stuff.  Not having any pain and having the use of my foot back - and having Medicare take care of it all - I felt like a seriously lucky person.