Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument

Idaho's state fossil is not quite a horse. Equus simplicidens, the Hagerman horse, stood about the size of a zebra, and comparing its bones with living species, scientists place it closer to zebras than to modern horses. It is also among the oldest widely accepted members of the genus Equus, grazing a Pliocene country of lakes and marsh here roughly three to four million years ago.

A cattle rancher, Elmer Cook, found the bones eroding from these bluffs and in 1928 showed them to H. T. Stearns of the U.S. Geological Survey, who passed them to James Gidley at the Smithsonian. Gidley's crews dug from 1929 through 1931 and again in 1934, working a quarry that grew to a 45-foot back wall, and shipped three tons of specimens east. The quarry held more than two hundred horses of both sexes and every age, a herd, and the largest single find of the species. Those remains are still in the Smithsonian's collection.

The fossil beds themselves are closed. The monument, created in 1988, protects 4,351 acres of the bluffs, and the only fossils on show are in the Thousand Springs Visitor Center, which the Park Service shares with the state on US-30 a mile north of downtown Hagerman. The overlooks are about nine miles away on Bell Rapids Road: one above the Snake and the pale bluffs, the other looking across the Hagerman Valley at the route of the Oregon Trail, whose ruts still cross the monument's southern end. The three-mile Emigrant Trail links them. Carry water; there is no shade.