Shoshone Falls are the Niagara of Idaho…in the spring. We are here in the fall, and they are lovely but trickles compared to Niagara. We are chasing waterfalls for a couple of days. I said “we’re waterfalling” and Tony said that’s not a thing so I put in a proper verb:)

We drove a short distance to Shoshone Falls Park for lunch. We walked on the Centennial trail back toward our turnaround spot from Evel Knievel’s jump site earlier. This direction, we had the uphill hard part first, then downhill on the way back.

The Snake River Canyon is volcanic rock which is part of the lava fields we saw up in Craters of the Moon. The Snake River Plain has several shield volcanoes, but none have been active for a couple thousand years. Here, the river has carved through the rock with the help of a historic flood from the Bonneville Lake, which was in the Great Salt Lake basin but about the size of Lake Michigan. About 11,000 years ago, Bonneville Lake flooded the Snake River Canyon, making it twice as deep as it was, creating Shoshone Falls and many side canyons downstream and redistributing farmland and boulders. The geology of this area is fascinating.