One of the first steps for planning this trip was a survey of the wilderness and backcountry guidelines in each National Park. We hoped to spend one night camping in the backcountry of each park we visited, but each park had a different process for securing permits, so I started by combing through the details.
Arriving at the NPS.gov page for Craters of the Moon National Monument, I chanced on this passage:
“Fewer than 100 visitors obtain a backcountry permit for the Craters of the Moon Wilderness each year, making this a unique wilderness experience and an excellent opportunity for quiet, solitude, and stargazing.“
It felt like a personal challenge. A chance to do something that fewer than 100 other people do any given year? A chance for solitude in the Year of the Crowded National Park? Obviously we’d be getting this permit.
Some parks require an advanced reservation (Olympic, Redwood). Some offer advanced reservations or walk-in permits (Tetons, Rainier, Glacier), and a few parks, where camping is so infrequently requested, the only option is to walk in (Lassen, Craters of the Moon).
When we walked up to the ranger on tourist-wrangling duty and asked for our wilderness permit, he grinned. “I haven’t written one of these all week,” he said. I was delighted to find the internet’s claim confirmed, and even more delighted at the notion of having the wilderness entirely to ourselves.
We had arrived in the park around lunchtime, and by the time we had acquired our permit the temperature had reached 100 degrees. My phone pinged in an instant of unexpected signal. I checked it to find a text from the king of the park, who is a family friend:
“There’s not a lot of shade out there. You’re welcome to stay with us tonight if you don’t want to fight the heat.”
A sparkle of doubt crept into my exuberant plan. The hike to our camp site would cover about four miles. We’d have to wear our big packs. It would be hot. Relentlessly hot.
But… but… I wanted to be one of less than a hundred people! Also, there were volcanos back there I wanted to collect.
“We don’t have to go right away,” Dustin said. “Why don’t we go do some of the frontcountry trails, see some of the caves, then we can start out for the wilderness when it starts to cool off?”
This plan sounded eminently sensible, so I sent a note to his highness confirming my enthusiasm for hiking in three-digit temperatures, and we set off for the loop road.
Craters of the Moon is not a small park, but the portion of it considered frontcountry is not enormous. If one starts early enough in the day, one can reasonably visit all four of the open lava caves, Inferno Cone, Spatter Cones, Devil’s Orchard nature trail, and hike at least one of the longer trails.
We started with peanut butter sandwiches in the car, as we always do.
To clarify: Yes, it was 100 degrees. Yes, I am wearing long sleeves. It’s that or a gallon of sunscreen and nine times out of ten I’d rather have the extra layer of fabric than deal with the sunscreen. I’m a delicate flower.
And then we headed down into Craters of the Moon’s lava caves!
These are the first American lava tubes we’ve visited. I’ve already posted about the caves at Lava Beds NM, but I’ve been posting out of order – we visited these caves the day before we visited Lava Beds, so this was all new to us. As we planned to save our headlamps to explore the more numerous caves in Lava Beds (save the bats!), we used only the flashlights from our cell phones in these caves and did just fine. (I don’t actually recommend it: having both hands free would have been the much safer option.)
Having soaked up as much cool cave air as we could find, we decided it was time to get our groove on and head out to the wilderness. By the time we finally got our packs together and headed out, it was after 6pm. I sincerely hoped to make it to camp by 8:00, which would mean eating dinner around 8:30. Since the sun basically never sets on this side of the timezone, though, that would only be a philosophical rather than a technical problem.
Our trail led us for miles through the scorched and jagged lava fields pictured above. This is the trail I had been expecting when I put on my capri hiking pants. I always hike in long pants because I’m a giant sissy about getting my legs all scratched up by trail-crowding plants. But this trail should have been all lava rocks, and the day was SO HOT…
Technically, one can camp anywhere in the Craters Wilderness. Unlike most other parks, there are no designated campsites or even zones – you are simply asked to tread as lightly as possible and leave your campsite in the same condition you found it. They do, however, strongly recommend that folks out for only one night camp in Echo Crater, a zone that has been previously impacted by campers and therefore is both ideally suited for camping and means fewer spots get disturbed.
Echo Crater is located about half a mile off the regular path which required literal bushwhacking through the sage. My poor, naked shins! Let this be a lesson to me: do not make exceptions to the Always Wear Pants Rule.
And so, with great relief, we pitched our tent. Even with the bushwhacking and the heat, it turns out I can hike a much faster mile on level terrain than I can while gaining crazy elevation (22 minutes, baby!) That meant we arrived well before 8:00, a fact both my shins and my rumbling tummy appreciated.
This was one of the coolest campsites we had through our whole trip. Not only were we camped inside the crater of a very obvious (if dormant or maybe extinct) volcano, the ground was a lovely, loose sand that was an absolute dream to sleep on. No sticks or rocks poking into your back when the ground is basically a giant bed of kitty litter! Also: there were no flies, no mosquitoes, and no wasps. The only bugs we saw at all were these bizarre little beetles that looked liked microscopic turtles.
When we woke up in the morning, there were half a dozen of these little guys marching around on the outside of our tent. I swear they were behaving exactly like koopa troopas, following fixed paths. I could hear the 8-bit music in the background. The internet now tells me this is the nymph form of a Chlorochroa stink bug, but these guys were nothing but polite while we were around.
Once out of the crater and back out on the trail, we ditched our backpacks (no evil marmots here to raid our abandoned packs) in order to hike a bit farther out into the wilderness. I wanted to see more volcanos, and the Sentinel and the Watchman were only another couple miles out. Without backpacks on level terrain? Piece of cake.
March march 
march march.
The first volcano of the morning was The Sentinel. It loomed as we approached on the trail like a giant pimple., with nothing subtle about the way it stuck out of the surrounding landscape. It wasn’t discouragingly tall, so we made our way around to the side that had plants growing on it (at this point, my fear of cinder slopes was only instinctual – I hadn’t yet experienced the joy of actually climbing them) and headed up.
The view from the top of The Sentinel was okay, but it became quickly apparent that we’d climbed the wrong volcano. The Watchman, just to the east, was a much more impressive volcano.
“What do you want to do?” Dustin asked. It was 10am and still a comfortable temperature, but we had seven more miles to hike.
“We’ve gotta climb it,” I said.
The views from the top of the Watchman were delightful. The cone itself had revegetated, but the lava flows still looked freshly oozed, and extended as far as we could see into the distance. The Watchman was a nice cone, sure, but it seemed awfully small to have produced all that lava.
The distances in the wilderness are baffling. It should have been four miles from the trailhead to Echo Crater and another two-ish miles to the Sentinel and Watchman, but I somehow managed to clock 9.5 miles of hiking for the day. By the time we returned to civilization – without having seen another soul anywhere along the trail – the weather was just starting to crank back up to Fiendishly Hot.
We reported our safe return to the rangers. Since we were the only backcountry campers they’d had all week, we thought they might want to know. Four separate rangers asked us about the condition of the trail. As a wilderness trail, it is not maintained the way most backcountry trails are maintained, and can disappear at times if the traffic and weather aren’t ideal. We were happy to report that we’d had no trouble following it all the way out to the Sentinel and Watchman, and that it appeared to possibly continue even farther.
I would absolutely love to return and explore the Craters of the Moon Wilderness in greater depth, perhaps in a friendlier spring or fall month. The biggest trouble is the lack of water – with no natural sources, campers have to pack in every drop of water they need. Not a big deal for a single night, but when you need a gallon per person per day and a gallon of water weighs 8.4 pounds, you can’t exactly spend a whole week poking around.
And even after just two long days out in the heat, we were immensely grateful to accept the hospitality (and shower) of the royal family. They had both best welcome committee and the best mattress of any place we stayed during our whole trip.
Thither & Yon 