So sorry that I haven't been posting. We arrived in Newberg, OR on Monday and have been very busy or with other people the whole time. Prior to that we were doing a great deal of siteseeing and getting in late. This has truly been an life-expanding experience. We have seen so much, learned a great deal and met some wonderful people. While we were there we met a very friendly man from Austria. He had managed a forest and he was full of interesting information and points of view on everything from education to philosophies of life. His wife was very patient and waited while he talked and walked with Viv. I had walked ahead and sat on a bench. She and I talked and I found her a very nice, but much more reserved person than he. They have two children; one is doctor in Boston who is affiliated with Harvard. Their son is in Austria and was finishing up law school. They had come to the USA to see their first grandchild and to tour the West.
The Monument and Preserve encompass three major lava fields and about 400 square miles of sagebrush steppe grasslands to cover a total area of 1,117 square miles. All three lava fields lie along the Great Rift of Idaho, with some of the best examples of open rift cracks in the world, including the deepest known on Earth at 800 feet. There are excellent examples of almost every variety of basaltic lava as well as tree molds (cavities left by lava-incinerated trees), lava tubes (a type of cave), and many other volcanic features. We were able to see into one of the lava tubes and it was about 20 feet deep. It had a very other world kind of feeling. They said that NASA had trained astronauts here to acclimate them to the type of surface they woudl confront on the moon. They also tested lunar vehicles and equipment in this very rugged and challenging terrain.
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