A Misplaced Town of the Great Plains

Southern Idaho.  What goes through a traveler's mind when going through a new town?  Perhaps they want to quickly put the town into some well-known category.  It was fun the other day to be confused about a town I was seeing for the first time.  I was even having trouble thinking of the right adjectives.  Finally, "solid" and "underwhelming" seemed best.

Everything did its best to be unflashy, untouristy, and unpicturesque.   Most people think that the American cowboy, where he actually still exists, is picturesque and romantic.  But this is what the town gave me, instead:

It is easy to see why an ATV (quad) is more practical than a horse, especially with all the downstream-of-Yellowstone lava around.  The vaquero did not even glance at me, despite how rare it is to see a camper in this area.  The vacas paid us little attention, as well.  But when El Toro came by my camp and registered some complaints, I decided to change locations:

The town's only claim to hipsterism was a red Amazon locker in front of one of the grocery stores.

But it did have a little bit of a tourist attraction, although it registered only locally.  We finally biked to the open top of the cave:

My little dog makes me so nervous around verticalities of the downward persuasion.

I have a new smartphone and thought I could make the flash work.  Maybe it just wasn't capable of illuminating the abyss, where legend has it, that 30 or 40 down on the floor of the lava cave, green ferns manage to survive with the light that comes in through the "roof."  There is even an entrance hole to the cave about 100 feet away, which I finally found.  But without a headlamp, there was no point of crawling in there.  Who am I kidding?

Nothing was marked for the tourist.  No parking lot.  No brown carsonite signs.  No information kiosk.  No fees and regulations and safety warnings.  Just imagine!  After all these years I finally found a tourist attraction that had moral integrity!  By now I was fluttering my eyelashes.

You don't run into towns like this very much.  They are towns with a surprisingly strong agricultural and ranching base.  They fit in better with the John Deere baseball caps of the Great Plains than the cowboy hats of the intermountain western states.