Craters of the Moon National Monument

The name came first from a geologist. In 1923 H. T. Stearns of the U.S. Geological Survey, the same man who passed the Hagerman horse bones to the Smithsonian, proposed a national monument here and wrote that the dark craters and cold lava looked like the surface of the moon seen through a telescope. It took a showman to make the name stick.

Robert Limbert was a Boise taxidermist, furrier, trick shot and tireless promoter of Idaho, and in the early 1920s he made three trips into lava that emigrants and ranchers had passed for decades and found nothing to love in. On the last, with W. L. Cole and an Airedale terrier, he crossed the field from south to north, about eighty miles in seventeen days. After three days the dog's feet were raw and bleeding, and the two men carried him or waited while he picked his way over the rock. Limbert named what he found as he went, Amphitheater Cave, the Blue Dragon Flow, the Bridge of Tears, and in March 1924 National Geographic ran his account under the geologist's title.

He sent Calvin Coolidge a scrapbook as well. Coolidge proclaimed the monument on May 2, 1924, about two months after the article, and some 1,500 people drove the gravel and cinder roads to the dedication that June. It covered about 54,000 acres; in 2000 it was enlarged roughly thirteenfold.

The seven-mile loop road from the visitor center reaches the spatter cones, the climb up Inferno Cone and the lava tubes of the Caves Area, where a free permit from the visitor center is needed to go underground.