If you Google “cinder garden” you’ll likely get lots results for DIY gardens made of cinder blocks. There is also a much more beautiful and natural interpretation of “cinder garden”. Natural cinder gardens, also called “Devil’s gardens” exemplify resilience and the circle of life. These gardens form as an early step in the reclamation process […]
How did I end up at Idaho’s Mammoth Cave and Shoshone Bird Museum? In my travels across the US, I’ve passed numerous “roadside museums”. These are always so run down it’s questionable if they are even operational. The entrance often features a large, faded, crumbling outdoor animal statue meant to attract the interest of children […]
Are these watermelons? Petrified watermelons, melon rocks, melon gravel – these are all names for basalt boulders scattered across the Snake River corridor. While the process of petrification can turn organic material like watermelons into stone, watermelons did not even exist when these rock monoliths were formed. The colloquial name “petrified watermelons” comes from a […]
Why Idaho? Everyone has asked me, “Why Idaho?”. Idaho has some street cred as a winter skiing paradise, but is not renowned as a summer vacation destination. TLC be dammed, I am a waterfall chaser, and Idaho is home to Shoshone Falls. Taller than Niagara Falls, the 212 foot drop in the Snake River at […]
Remember that time you watched Jurassic Park at age 7 and spent the next five years convinced you had to hide under the covers and not breathe or else the T-Rex would get you? If we’ve learned anything from Jurassic Park, it’s that life will find a way, and not just dinosaurs. Plants are plotting […]
🎵 O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain 🎵 Not so fast! This might be Idaho, one the nation’s top producers of hay, wheat, and barley, but those are not shining seas of beautiful grains. This is cheatgrass. What is cheatgrass? Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), also known as downy brome, is a fast […]
