Swan Falls Dam near Kuna Idaho

 

Base Jumpers at Twin Falls Bridge

We stopped off at Twin Falls for a few hours, wandered around town and spent some time watching some base jumpers.  I have decided they have to be a little crazy.

 

Jumper standing on the edge of the bridge

 

Twin Falls Bridge

Jim held the camera sideways, not realizing there would be no way to turn it straight. If you watch carefully you can see the jumper on his trip down.

We spent a week on the Idaho, Nevada border at a place called Rabbit Springs.  Jim read on the internet that it had great rock hunting for Apache tears, and thunder eggs.  We found plenty of both.  I think Jim filled an entire kitty litter bucket with thunder eggs.  Not sure what he plans for all of them.

The first day there I had Jim put out the awning as we had no shade and it was pretty hot.  About three hours after opening it there was a huge stray wind that blew through the area and before either of us could even get to the door the wind caught the awning, flipped it up and bent one the support polls. UGH!!  One section of the support slides inside another so with the one section bent it was impossible to close the awning.  After attempting to straighten the section of poll Jim ended up having to cut the inside section in half so we could get the darn awning closed up.

Besides looking for rocks we spent some time running around the country side in the jeep.  One day we drove over to a Salmon Falls Creek Reservoir which according to the map is huge. Well it is huge, but there was not a drop of water in site.  We did have a good time driving for miles along the lake bed and checking out the rock cliffs that surround the nonexistent lake.

 

View of cliff from the lake bed

 While driving across the lake bed we even ran into a herd of cattle around the corner you can see in front of us.

We pried up some layers of this rock hoping to find some fossils, but no such luck.

 



This is a section that had apparently fell from higher up the cliff.

American Falls, Idaho- I am absolutely going to buy a canoe

We spent a week parked at the American Falls Dam and I was wishing again that we had, had the foresight to invest in some kind of boat. It's the pits to be parked at the water and spend time watching everyone else play around in their boats.

 

We did a lot of driving around in the jeep on the back roads.  We were mostly looking if there was anyplace better to park.  We found a couple of really nice sites, but there is no way we could have gotten the MH in to them.  Both places where on the banks of the Snake River, with lots of shade trees.

The reservoir was only at 19% capacity and looked as if it had been that way for quite some time.  We spent one day across the reservoir from where we were parked checking out the old town site location. In the 1920s they built the dam and had to move the entire town.  With the water so low we were able to see the foundation's of all the buildings they had moved. I think we read at the visitor center that they had to move somewhere close to fifty buildings.  Here is a picture of the grain silo that was left standing in place. Probably because it is 106 feet high and 40 feet under ground.

 

If you look closely you can see the lighter section at the bottom of the silo, that is usually under water.

Most days the wind would pick up in the afternoons and we would end the day with gray skies from all the smoke from the forest fires.  This trip has really made us aware of just how many forest fires there are during the summer months.  Although I did hear on the news that this year was particularly bad.  I can't think of even one state we have been to that there hasn't been forest fires.

Zoe Cat misses Dad

So for those of you who have never heard my story about our Zoe Cat, I will share.

When we decided to bring Zoe Cat with us, Jamie brought her to me and she brought a baggie full of food until I could get to the store the next morning. At bed time I put a hand full of food in her bowl and trundled off to bed.  About 3:00 in the morning Zoe Cat wakes me up and has her baggie of food with her.  I got up and stumbled out to her food dish to find she had cleaned her bowl, so I filled her bowl and went back to bed.  The next night the same thing happened and ever since we have kept a handful of food in a baggie for her to haul around. 

 

Anytime she brings it to bed and I don't wake up she will nip at the back of my neck and pull my hair until I wake up and give her a couple pieces of her food. 

 

Zoe Cat also plays with very strange toys. Last Christmas I bought her a Christmas stocking filled with stuffed mice, balls with bells, and little toys with feathers, she has never touched one of them. Her all time favorite toy is a straw that dad gave her.  She also loves to play with the little green stoppers that Starbucks puts in your lid so you don't spill. 

 

The only time she ever meows is just after we go to bed.  She drags her toys off her "kitty entertainment pedestal" and throws them around and meows.

 

Anyway now that you know about Zoe Cat, on with the original story.  The night before last we were talking to my dad on Skype and Zoe Cat heard his voice and went nuts!! She was pacing and meowing and looked like she was looking for Dad. When she couldn't find him she crawled up on the back of the chair I was sitting on and started nipping at my neck and biting my shoulder.  The entire time we talked she was just acting totally crazy.  I think she really misses him.

 

 

 



Idaho Falls, Idaho

When we got to Idaho Falls we spent the first night at Walmart.  Jim as usual was busy checking out the surrounding area with the binoculars when he noticed what looked like an interesting sculpture so after dinner we took a walk to check it out.  The sculpture sets in the middle of a roundabout.  The whole area was kind of cool with the neat office buildings and the fancy roundabout.

 

 

 

 

  When we got back to the MH we visited with a very nice couple from Saskatchewan. They spend most summers here in the states and were currently on their way to Jackson Hole. They are like us in that they do most of their camping in free spots although it sounded like they do a lot of Walmart parking where we try to find free camping in more out the way areas. We stayed at Walmart that first night then took the jeep the next morning and located and planned our route to the Idaho Falls South Tourist park, where we planned to stay for a couple of days.

 

 

It was a pretty park on the edge of the Snake River.  As I was getting parked I happened to notice a drive in movie screen right smack in front of us.

 

Later that night the movie came on and we had a perfect view.  Took us a while to find the radio station broadcasting the sound, but Jim did eventually find it so we watched two movies.

I have to say that park was the strangest place we have stayed.  The web site where I found out about the park said there was a fair amount of late night teenage traffic. I’m not sure which part of the park they had stayed at, but the traffic we saw was not teenagers.  I think it may have been drug traffic? We saw a couple of cars multiple times parking at the edge of the park and pretty soon another car would pull up, they would both get in one car or the other and pretty quickly they would get back in their own cars and drive away. One car in particular was there at least a dozen times per day.  Even with that going on we felt safe staying there. There were lots of other people and the area was well lit.

 

 

 

 

 

First Days in Idaho

Our first day in Idaho we went to visit the opal mines in Spencer, Idaho. Unfortunately you can’t go up to the mines. You only get to see pictures. Bummer!  The shop we went into is a family run business. The husband does the mining and processes the opals.  The wife mounts the stones and runs the shop.  They had several really unique pink opals that were gorgeous. They also had pieces of rock that contained opal in its natural state.  Neither Jim nor I had any idea what natural opal looked like.   We bought a piece to bring home with us.

 

 The lady was very informative, taking time to explain the whole process.  In a nut shell opal starts out as a liquid and ends up a solid when it hardens in the cracks and crevices of rock.  Another thing we learned is that not all opals in jewelry are solid stones. Many opals are what they call triplets. They take a thin layer of opal, back it with a thin layer of basalt, and then it is covered with a very thin layer of glass. I had no idea! I always thought of an opal along the same lines as any of the other precious stones, more like a solid piece of something, rather than a thin vein running through rock.

 

Our second day we spent looking for rocks in Dubois.  The lady at the opal place had told us that people had been finding sun stones inside pieces of pumas in the Dubois area.

 

We drove all over the Dubois area looking for pumas.  The only thing we ended up finding that was in any related to volcanoes was what looked like a lava tube that had collapsed.