The campground is on a quiet paved road, so we did a bike ride this morning out to the main highway. Been a while since we've been on the bike, and we felt it, especially with the 6000' altitude and a few sharp hills, but fun ride anyway.
Broke camp early afternoon and continued south. Left the Salmon River somewhere and passed through several very large valleys with high mountains all around, separated by rocky canyons. Cattle and hay country, large scale irrigated fields. Mountains are mostly treeless but many different colors as the sunlight shifted.
Short drive so no hurry, and we paid attention to the historical markers. One invited us to turn up a dirt road for 2 miles and promised an earthquake site. Highlight of the day- Turns out there was a major earthquake here in 1983 (7.5), which raised the mountains a foot and lowered the valley 7'. The dirt road ended where there was a 20' wide crack in the earth, now a deep ditch which extends 21 miles. Once we knew what it was we could clearly see it extending into the distance (can see the crack on Google satellite view, too). The earthquake cause many new springs to form in the valley (already known as the Valley of 1000 springs), and get this: 400 billion gallons of water suddenly gushed to the surface. Put your calculator to work: that's about 3 miles across and 100' deep.
Stopped at campground at Arco, a little town with a moment of fame: In 1955 Arco was the first town in the world ever electrified by nuclear power, in 1955. It was an experiment, using a research reactor off in the desert nearby. Many of the retail businesses here call themselves Atomic this and that.
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