Tuesday cruising around Island Park, Idaho

On Saturday just before we arrived at the Red Rock campground, we entered the little town of Island Park, Idaho near the intersection of US Route 20 and Idaho Route 87. Population 286. We proceeded south on Rt. 20 a few miles and turned off onto a side road to the campground.

This morning we started out on our local trip by going back out to Route 20 and turning south. The GPS showed that we were headed toward Island Park. Wait a minute - we already went through there north of here! What the .... ? A town can't be north of us AND south of us.

Yes it can, according to Wikipedia:
" Island Park is a city in Fremont County, Idaho, United States. The city's population was 215 at the 2000 census. The city was incorporated by owners of the many lodges and resorts along U.S. Route 20 in 1947, primarily to circumvent Idaho's liquor laws that prohibited the sale of liquor outside of city limits. It is only 500 feet (150 m) wide in most locations and, at 33 miles (53 km), claims to have the longest "Main Street" in the world."

So we headed for Sawtelle Peak, shown in this picture:




Do you see the little round dot at the top? That is a radar dome for airplanes. The peak is over 10,000 feet above sea level, which would be a new record for us on this trip. Poppa said "We're going for it!" And we did. Starting around 6,400 feet, gravel road, no guard rails, ALMOST two lanes wide. We got to 9,328 feet, at a beautiful sweeping left turn with nothing below us on the right but air, when Nana said "That's enough!", crawled into the back seat, and sat on the floor. Poppa turned around (pretty scary in itself), drove back down to 6,470 feet, stopped the truck, and pulled the cooler out of the back seat so Nana could crawl out.

Poppa said he was really disappointed we couldn't get to the top. He thought 10,000 feet would be a good opportunity to do some high-altitude training for our trip to Peru in September. Maybe run a couple miles, do a dozen 100-yard wind sprints. I think Poppa was really glad Nana wanted to turn around - he didn't look like he was having that much fun.

The rest of the day was much nicer. We went to Big Springs, where 120,000,000 gallons of water comes bubbling out of the ground EVERY DAY! It is the beginning of the Henry's Fork of the Snake river, and is the clearest water I've ever seen:









Right beside it is the Johnny Sack Cabin. It's really neat, so follow the link to read about it. Here are some pictures:













Then we went to the Upper Mesa Falls:





and the Lower Mesa Falls:



There was a beautiful old inn at the upper falls:





A very nice day, with no crowds.

I hope Nana and Poppa weren't too harsh in their opinion of Yellowstone yesterday. It is very nice, and I think the crowds and traffic jams got to them.

Tomorrow is a "camp day" - laundry, haircut, truck wash, house cleaning, etc. And then in the evening - dinner theater at Mack's Inn Playhouse (somewhere in Island Park), where we'll see "The Three Amigos". One of the lead actors was our waiter at lunch today at the Henry's Fork Landing Cafe. His brother-in-law runs the theater and his other brother-in-law is the chef. We'll post a full review.



Posted from Nana's iPad