An interlude in Idaho

400 miles of Desert 

Right in the middle of our time in the desert we heard our names being called in the distance by a place called Stanley. There was over 400 miles of desert between us and the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, some pretty unforgiving landscape at that. Life in this world is hard, dry and seriously hot but we keep driving. 300 miles eastward on highway 80, we would end up in New York if we carried on (for about three days), but we turn off and head north, still in the parched desert but finding a few little gems along the way, waterfalls and ice caves straight from the Land of the Lost.

Snake River, Magic Valley, Idaho, 2016

We have a pit stop in a place called ‘Twin Falls’ home of the Shoshone Falls, labelled as the Niagara Falls of the West but standing a full 46 feet taller than it’s more famous relative. The falls were created about 14,000 years ago by a catastrophic flood when the pluvial Lake Bonneville burst it’s banks towards the end of the Pleistocene ice age. Most of the Great Basin overflowed and ran into the Snake River. The flood waters crashed through the landscape with a 300 ft wave and lasted for over a year, the lake at Salt Lake City is all that is left of the original huge expanse of water.

Shoshone Falls, Magic Valley, Idaho, 2016