It was finally long overdue for the Holcomb family to hit the road again, and do some exploring. This was going to be our first big trip since Adelaide was born in March of 2020, and we weren't sure quite what to expect.
We left home on Friday morning and didn't have much in our plans expect stopping for lunch at Stanley Lake. I had never seen the lake before, and the Sawtooth Mountains are my favorite peaks in the whole country.
We arrived at my parents house Friday evening and we enjoyed a few days spending time with them, visiting some of Amber's relatives, visiting some childhood friends & people from church, and spending a day in the Owyhee Mountains hunting for rocks (I didn't take any pictures during this time).
On Tuesday my parents joined us as we began our road trip across Idaho. The plan was to visit a few places that I had never made it to, despite growing up in Idaho. We followed HWY 78 that took us through some beautiful country, before arriving at our first series of destinations for the day. I wanted to see some of what Thousand Springs State Park had to offer. The park is composed of quite a few different areas spread out across an area of Southern Idaho. I had visited Box Springs Canyon years ago, but I hoped to see a little bit more.
We started out with eating a picnic lunch at Malad Gorge, and then doing a quick walk across the foot bridge.
My parents decided they wanted to see the Ritter Island section of the park so we headed there next. A lot of the old homestead buildings weren't open for touring at that time, but we were able to see one of the many (Hence the name "Thousand Springs) impressive springs spilling down into the Snake River Canyon. The water is believed to originate to the North where multiple rivers disappear into the porous volcanic basalt. It reappears an estimated 100 years later in all these springs to the South.
After spending some time at Ritter Island, we moved on to visit Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument. Sadly the Visitor Center in Hagerman, ID (where you can view the fossil remains of the Hagerman Horse) wasn't open. But we were able to go out to the Monument land and hike along a section of the original Oregon Trail where you can still see the wagon ruts worn into the ground. It was pretty neat to imagine the struggling West-bound pioneers treading the very ground in front of us over 160 years ago, and to see the evidence still preserved.
In regards to the National Monument's name sake, it's a bit tricky to weed out all the evolutionary speculation and get to the truth. Starting in 1929 excavations began after a local rancher had showed fossils to a government geologist. To date the fossil beds have produced 20 complete Hagerman Horse skeletons. The banks where the fossils are found are an area of exposed sedimentary rock beds immediately above the Snake River. Buried on top of these sediment layers is the expansive volcanic rock that is found all over Southern Idaho. At least from a basic geologic perspective the area must have been a massive burial location during Noah's flood: Whether that was due to bodies accumulating in this one particular area as a result of a water blockage, or it was a false vestige of safety for the animals fleeing the rising flood waters, and they were then buried there. Most likely Post-flood volcanism then buried the surrounding area, covering up a lot more of these sediment layers.
Hagerman Fossil Beds was our last stop for the day. So we headed to Twin Falls where we had an Airbnb reserved for a couple nights. We all tried to relax and get some sleep for the next day's adventures.
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