The next morning we got up early and headed to Craters of the Moon which is about 18 miles from Arco, Idaho.  This national monument is a 618 square mile preserve that is a lava field that contains and is the result of 25 volcanic cones erupting over time.  Parts of it are completely desolate with no vegetation and just black lava rocks as far as you can see, which is probably where the name comes from because that’s exactly what the moon looks like.

We recommend you drive the Scenic Loop and hike all the features. Then hike all the caves but just make sure you understand the restrictions. Don't make the same mistake we did! Thinking about visiting Craters of the Moon? We share cave hike restrictions, maps, camping, and our photo gallery. Don’t have time to read this now? Pin it for later!

1 - Drive the Scenic Loop

There is a seven-mile scenic loop (highlighted in yellow) you do by car with seven different stops to get out and hike various terrain.  There is a big volcano crater you can view from the rim, some spatter cones you can climb up and look into, the inferno cone hill you hike up, and a few other features that filled the morning until the 1 pm ranger talk.

At stop five, we recommend you start hiking up North Crater Trail until you get to the first Big Crater and then turnaround and hike to the Spatter Cones.

Cave Hike Restrictions

We planned to get there before 9 am so we could do a 10 am Ranger-led tour of one of the caves there (the caves are lava tubes).  Unfortunately, we found out that our hiking shoes, which we had worn at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico over six months ago, were a red flag.  This was because the caves have a bat population, and if you’ve been to another bat cave previously, they want you to wear completely different clothes/gear/shoes so as to not spread an emergent disease called white-nose bat syndrome. 

We knew this from our Carlsbad Caverns visit earlier in the year and had read up on this and thought we were well prepared by wearing different clothes, backpack, and disinfecting our hiking boots according to the NPS guidelines but upon arriving, we were told the procedures were not effective enough so they were just outright banning people who wore anything that had been to a previous bat cave. 

They gave us a permit anyway, with the understanding we would go home and get different shoes, which we did so we missed the 10 am ranger hike to the caves.  Luckily, there is another at 1 pm so we just decided to tour the park on our own.

2 - Hike Indian Tunnel Cave

We arrived at the Indian Tunnel Cave on time but there was no Ranger (we weren’t sure if we were supposed to meet at the cave entrance or the parking lot), so we ended up doing the hike on our own using a map we grabbed at the entrance.  This first cave was pretty huge and mostly had openings in the ceiling so it was still pretty well lit and really is more like a giant tunnel.

After climbing down the entrance head left. Once you get to the large collapse in the ceiling continue through the rocks.

3 - Hike Boyscout Cave

The second cave we went to, the Boyscout Cave, was way more fun as you had to crawl through parts and it was pitch black inside and went to a distance of about 500 feet in.  It was so cold that inside the cave the water that drips in from the ceiling forms ice.  We started to do the other half of the cave (the entrance is at the midpoint), but that one was a bit much as you were crawling through most of it and it just went deeper which was a bit unnerving thinking about the tons of the rock over our heads. 

4 - Hike Beauty Cave

The last cave we went to was the Beauty Cave which had a big entrance but did not go far inside as they had closed the back part of it off due to rock collapse.  We also saw that somebody had tagged some of the rocks inside with graffiti that had not been cleaned up yet. :(. We were pretty exhausted at that point, and headed back to Arco where we stopped at Pickle’s restaurant to have...fried pickles! (And tater tots!) before retiring for the day.

Camping

Lava Flow Campground, located inside Craters Of The Moon, is an option but it fills up quickly and there are limited spots for larger RVs. We drove through (with our Jeep) on the way to our hike and our 37’ class A motorhome and Jeep would have fit in site #1 and #2 but not sure about any others.

Honey’s Park

We stayed at a unique Boondocker’s Welcome host in the nearby town of Arco. Our host was an interesting and generous fellow named Scar who runs a makeshift campground called Honey’s Park out of the lot he owns and also lives on in a renovated school bus.  The campground is down a short dirt road that leads to a big open field where you can set up pretty much wherever you like.  Before reaching the end of the road, there is a signpost Scar made that has a map of the “campground”.  You can even find 30A and 50A electric power poles scattered throughout if you need them at no cost. He has a donation box on the signpost if you would leave a small donation.  Another school bus is even set up as a hostel of sorts for people just passing through who don’t want to sleep in their car. 

When we got there, there was already a truck with a camper in the bed and another truck pulling a classic Argosy which is an Airstream from the 70s/80s but instead of the classic aluminum, it is a painted white shell with end caps made out of steel.  Scar wasn’t there when we arrived as he was on a road trip but told us to come anyway and make ourselves at home.

EBR-1

Did you know Arco "was the first community in the world ever to be lit by electricity generated solely by nuclear power?" If visiting from May to Sept check out EBR-I, the world’s first nuclear breeder reactor, which powered a whopping four 200 watt light bulbs.  Unfortunately, it was already closed during our trip.

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Craters of the Moon Pictures