The road was lots of fun, but we were running out of daylight due to our late start out of Pullman and finally found a place to stay at the Sourdogh Lodge where we had the lodge itself. This ended up being a blessing because we all had beds and showers, plus the restaurant serves up a nice prime rib dinner as well as breakfast that we enjoyed in the morning. So even though we had a late start, we ended up very near to where I had originally planned. Not too bad.
Sunday, July 7th
The next morning after breakfast we took off for lower altitudes, passing through Stanley and then heading south on 75 toward Sun Valley. I can see why the area has that name as it's a very wide valley with the resort up on the mountain in clear view. As I'm riding I'm thinking that it doesn't look that high for a ski resort so I asked Grant to check his GPS for altitude. At the moment we were at about 6000 feet, which makes the ski area respectably high. We gassed up in town, but passed through and ate lunch in Hailey at the Snow Bunny burger joint where someone stole my prescription sunglasses. This is the second pair of prescription sunglasses I've lost, it'll be the last time too. I obviously can't be trusted with such valuable glasses. It'll be the cheap stuff for me from now on.
Anyways you have to move on, so after that we continued south, connecting on to 20, and then 26 to get to Craters of the Moon National Monument. This would be the first of the National Parks we'd visit and while entering we purchased an annual park pass good for all National Parks. This would help us get into all the other parks quickly and save us some money at the same time.
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Craters is a really interesting place to visit. I'd have used the word "cool" but considering it was about 100 degrees that day, it seems the wrong way to describe it. The entire area is a very old lava field. You can see how the lava flowed and solidified. Geologist Harold Stearns described it as "The surface of the moon as seen through a telescope." President Calvin Cooledge proclaimed it a national monument in 1924 giving it the name as described by Stearns.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
