Idaho Falls, Idaho to Twin Falls, Idaho

I spent last night in Idaho Falls, a city I had passed through in 2011 when I was returning from my first trip to the Salt Flats.  I remembered the city as being very pretty, and it is as you can see from the pics I took from along the green space adjacent to their downtown area:

The steeple you see in the background is from their Mormon Temple.

I headed on west from Idaho Falls to the little town of Arco, Idaho.  Arco has the distinction of being the first town in the World to be lit with electricity generated in a nuclear power plant.  In this case, it's the Experimental Breeder Reactor, or EBR-1, which was build in the early 1950's and produced its first electricity in December, 1951. There is a well-designed self-guided tour through the facility and the tour explains a lot about the physics behind the design and operation of the reactor.  This is the reactor building, actually not very large:

The reactor itself was actually cooled by a liquid metal alloy of Sodium and Potassium:

Anyway, I thought the physics was pretty interesting.  Here is a listing of some of the milestones of the EBR-1 project up to its decommissioning in 1996:

After completing my tour of EBR-1, I headed on west to Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve.  The Monument includes some 750,000 acres of lava flows, cinder cones, spatter cones, and other structures that remain from eruptions that occurred roughly 2700 to 10,000 years ago.  I'm afraid my lowly camera couldn't catch the scale of the lava fields and structures, but you should get some idea of their magnitude.

This is a small "spatter cone" that was formed from material that was ejected during an eruption.

This is a lava field.  You can see how the lava flowed pretty clearly:

This is a cinder cone.  It formed around an actual volcanic eruption.

This is an actual wall of cooled lava that dammed up another lava flow at a later time:

This was another spatter cone, that is made up of loose material that was ejected from an eruption:

Anyway, this was well worth the trip and you could spend days here exploring all the trails (which look like they all go up hill...)

I left Craters of the Moon and headed south to Twin Falls for the night.  Twin Falls is on a bluff overlooking the Snake River and they have a nice observation point under the Perrine Bridge on US93 heading into town:

That's pretty much it for today.  I'm in Twin Falls, ID for the night and will be heading south to the big town of Ely, Nevada for tomorrow night.  Weather was great today.

Miles today:  210
Total:  4,441