GIANT SANDWORMS AND SPINEY SKELETONS

The giant maw seemed to invite me into its inky darkness. Rolls upon rolls of its serpentine body curved out toward the rocky hill above. The sun beat relentlessly down so that I could see heat waves above its dark, shiny skin. Even though the air was cool, it was already hot in this place of sand and cinder. And for one moment in the darkening sunset, I imagined a Giant Sandworm, a fictional predator of Frank Herbert’s Dune instead of this forbidding, open-mouthed lava tube. 

I was not on Arrakis, Herbert’s fictional planet of Giant Sandworms and nomadic Zensunni wanderers, but in Craters of the Moon National Monument, five miles from the trailhead. The landscape is eerily barren. A series of eruptions over many thousand years has left a huge mass of cinder cones and lava flows in the eastern Snake River Plain, covering more than 7,500 square miles. A fountain of fire over 1,500 feet left Big Cinder, at 700 feet the tallest cinder cone in Craters of the Moon. Where fire didn’t shoot out white hot lava rock cinders building up around the base of the fire into a cone, glowing molten lava slithered down the plain, leaving huge long tubes, some even big enough to become hills and land forms, often leaving caves in their empty insides. Still elsewhere, the Earth’s crust witnessed the destructive power of fire as explosions shattered rock, sending the debris high into the air before falling into rubble heaps on the ground. Even Disney could not have imagined this.

 

My giant lava tube, looking very much like what I imagine Frank Herbert had in mind for his Arrakis Giant Sandworms, lay in a great bowl formed to the north of Sentinel Cinder Cone. My companion and I had been headed for Echo Crater, a collapsed section of Inferno Cone which provides some shade from the relentless high desert sun. Expecting a distinct trail, we passed the Crater and found ourselves in the lava flow area just below Sentinel Cone, approximately 1 mile further down the trail. The topography is tormented, and the going is slow once you pass Inferno Cone. The route, sometimes easily identified in wide avenues of cinder, quickly disappears where the sagebrush has been able to get a foothold in the hot, rocky soil. Once in the sagebrush, only the occasional lava rock cairns alert us we are moving in the right direction.

 

By the time we got to Sentinel, we had been walking well over two hours. We were hot and our feet were sore from the constant heat traveling through our very serviceable boots. And we were seriously worried about what was left of our water. We were even more tired than usual, having walked another 2.3 miles even before starting out on our hike to Echo Crater.

 

The backpack to Echo was an afterthought to the main event of the weekend, a Ranger-lead Flower Walk. Twice per year on two consecutive Saturdays, Ranger Lennie, a full-time Ranger at Craters, conducts a walk around the ancient Broken Top Cone describing not just the many blooms at this time of year but also other interesting and even edible plants. I had made reservations months before when I was returning from skiing in Ketchum, Idaho when the air was cold and the brilliant unbroken snow softened the twisted terrain.  I wanted to see Craters in a different season, just before the heat made it too hot and dry to hike from the car to the Park Service latrines at the trailheads.

 

I was lucky. Even though some of the flowers were just past their peak, others were in full bloom. Several species, like the monkeyflower and the penstemon, were familiar to me. Others, like scorpionweed, named for the similarity of the flower pod to a striking scorpion, and Spiny Skeletonweed, a member of the lettuce family with a skeletal structure and subtle purple flowers, were entirely new.  Many of the blooms were incredibly tiny and delicate in sharp contrast to the dark, tortured cinder, boulder and rock landscape.

 

Even in this barren desert (Craters only gets about 13 inches of rainfall on average per year), edible plants such as buckwheat, wire lettuce and desert parsley are abundant in the cracks of the lava flows and on the hills of the older cones where Mother Nature has done her work to soften the landscape. The dominant tree is the Limber Pine, a monoecious plant having both male and female parts on the same plant. The ‘normal’ female pinecone carries seeds which are then scattered in various ways-usually by hungry birds and wily rodents. The Limber Pine has the familiar female cones but it also has tiny clusters of softly colored male pinecones at the tips of its branches which do not produce seeds. The Ranger told us that this Limber Pine is unique in the pine world, being the only pine that produces both male and female cones.

 

It was only after the hike around Broken Top cinder cone was complete that we started out with our heavily laden packs (there are no reliable water sources in Craters of the Moon Wilderness Area).  We each had a hydropack and two other bottles of water which all together probably added close to eight pounds to each of our packs. We also had our sleeping pads and bags, food, extra clothing for warmth and anything else we felt we needed. We each carried a tent although neither of us had the energy or the will to pitch it once we arrived at Sentinel. Neither of us had shouldered a pack for months. Despite the relatively flat terrain, this backpack would be a good first outing after our breaks from backpacking! The heat and lack of available water made the short hike (a little less than 5 miles) to the shadeless Sentinel a challenge.

 

Backpacking or even hiking into a new area, particularly one that is vastly different geologically than you are used to, has its own deficits and rewards. The deficit is always something you did not forsee for which you did not plan.  The benefits? We saw beautiful plants and several birds, like the violet-green swallow, which we normally would never see in our familiar environments. We saw trees that looked bewitched and ready to carry the local witches to their coven meetings. We saw lava rocks left with an iridescent blue patina that we could only wish we could capture on film.  We slept under an incredible open sky under a ceiling bursting with stars. The greatest reward? We pushed beyond our comfort zones. We tried something new. We conquered Craters’ late spring season. We saw the Spiny Skeleton and even if just for a moment were transported to Arrakis, imagining the Giant Sandworm.