Idaho offers Sun, Moon and huckleberry beer
ARCO, Idaho — Huckleberry beer, Craters of the Moon park and Sun Valley: It was a trio of unique Idaho experiences.
My husband and I drove into Idaho from Montana on a beautiful drive along Highway 93, also known as the Salmon River Road. We were heading to Challis, Idaho, to spend the night at the Watermark Inn, where the staff struck just the right balance: pleasant and helpful but not in our faces. They gave us great advice for dinner, too: the River of No Return Brewing Co. We dined on locally made garlic and sage sausage with an ice-cold huckleberry lager to wash it down.
The next morning we headed for Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Arco. It’s a stark landscape: fields of cold, black lava punctuated with colorful bursts of sagebrush or wildflowers. A geologist in 1923 compared it to “the surface of the moon as seen through a telescope,” and NASA has sent astronauts here for research. Last year it was designated a “Dark Sky” park, perfect for viewing stars because there’s so little light pollution.
A 7-mile loop road takes you around the park to viewpoints and mostly short hikes to see cinder cones and craters. The lava came from a series of fissures in the earth known as the Great Rift, according to the National Park Service, beginning some 15,000 years ago.
From Craters of the Moon, we drove about two hours to Sun Valley Resort in Ketchum. The resort is known for skiing in winter and has been a haunt of the rich and famous for decades. Photos lining hotel hallways show visitors like Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe.
We checked out the dining options onsite and settled on Gretchen’s. Since my husband was driving, I had a cocktail — a Hemingway daiquiri in his honor.