Across southern Idaho from the Bear River to the atomic desert: a massacre site in Shoshone hands, an accidental geyser, a waterfall that runs on water rights, a camp's Honor Roll, and a lava field named by a geologist.
4 days · 475 miles · best in summer
Preston, ID → Arco, ID
The Snake River Plain is the flat, dry crescent that runs across the whole bottom of Idaho, and most people see it at eighty miles an hour on the interstate. This trip takes four days to cross it from the southeast, starting where the Bear River bends north of Preston and ending in the atomic desert outside Arco. On the way it passes through Newe country that the Shoshone and Bannock still hold and are reclaiming, through the irrigated farmland that one dam made out of sagebrush in a few seasons, past a World War II incarceration camp, down a canyon where springs pour out of the walls, and out onto lava so young it looks unfinished. Almost nothing on it is famous. All of it explains something about how this country was taken, watered and used.
The drive, day by day
Press play to run the whole route, drag to any mile, or jump straight to a day. Every stop links to its own page.
Day 1 · Boa Ogoi, Soda Springs and Lava Hot Springs
Setting out from Preston, ID · first stop Shoshone Falls
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Day 1
Boa Ogoi, Soda Springs and Lava Hot Springs
80 mi · about 1.75 hrs driving · overnight in Lava Hot Springs
Start at the pullout on US-91 north of Preston and look down on Boa Ogoi, where Army volunteers killed hundreds of Northwestern Shoshone in January 1863 and where the Band that descends from the survivors is now turning farm fields back into wetland. Then head northeast to Soda Springs and time your arrival for the top of the hour, when the town's accidental geyser, drilled in 1937 by men looking for hot water for a pool, goes off on its timer. Fill a cup at Hooper Spring north of town. End the day at Lava Hot Springs, soaking in state-owned pools on ground that was once inside the Fort Hall Reservation.
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Day 2
Fort Hall and Massacre Rocks to Twin Falls
170 mi · about 3.25 hrs driving · overnight in Twin Falls
Take I-15 north past Pocatello to exit 80 and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum, where the tribes tell Fort Hall from their side of the trade counter and arrange tours to the site of the old post. Then follow I-86 west along the Snake to Massacre Rocks, a park named for emigrant deaths that happened east of it, where Bonneville Flood boulders lie in the sagebrush and emigrants carved their names on Register Rock. Continue west to Twin Falls for the night. If there is light left, walk out on the Perrine Bridge over the canyon, where BASE jumpers may be stepping off the rail.
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Day 3
Shoshone Falls, Minidoka and the Thousand Springs
75 mi · about 2.25 hrs driving · overnight in Hagerman
Begin at Shoshone Falls east of town, 212 feet high and running on whatever Milner Dam and a 1907 power plant leave in the river. Cross the canyon and drive north to Minidoka, where the Honor Roll that incarcerated Japanese Americans built for their enlisted sons has been rebuilt at the entrance, and walk the trail through the old blocks. In the afternoon pick up the Thousand Springs route on US-30 and stop at Box Canyon Springs, where one spring fills a dead-end canyon with water that sank into the lava far to the northeast. Stay the night in Hagerman.
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Day 4
Hagerman to Craters of the Moon and EBR-I
155 mi · about 3.75 hrs driving · overnight in Arco
See the Hagerman horse, the state fossil that is closer to a zebra, at the Thousand Springs Visitor Center north of town, and drive the gravel to the fossil beds overlooks if you have time. Then head north and east across the plain to Craters of the Moon, a name a geologist coined in 1923 and a Boise promoter made stick; drive the loop, climb Inferno Cone and take a free cave permit into a lava tube. Finish at Experimental Breeder Reactor I east of Arco, the reactor that lit four bulbs in 1951 and later melted down, with two engines for a nuclear bomber in its parking lot.
The drives this trip follows
Each one is traced end to end on its own page, with every stop worth making along the way.
