On my way back down to San Francisco, I visited the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho — a vast ocean of lava flows with scattered islands of cinder cones and sagebrush. The Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve includes three huge lava fields and hundreds of square kilometers of sagebrush grasslands… with the total area being around 2,900 km². The lava fields were created only a few thousand years ago, with the earliest eruptions being only 15,000 years ago — very recent in geological time. Above you can see huge monoliths of volcanic basalt, possibly volcanic “necks”, in a photo I took on the North Crater Flow Trail.
Ernest Hemingway’s Grave
While in Idaho, I decided to make a short detour to Ketchum, to visit the grave of writer and Nobel prize winner Ernest Hemingway, who had a big influence on me when I was a teenager. I had half-expected to be accompanied on this visit by someone with a similar history with Hemingway, but when it (almost predictably) did not come to pass I was not too disappointed, for as legendary investor Charlie Munger says, the first rule of a happy life is to have low expectations. I found the grave littered with coins and even a pen, all votive offerings left by aspiring writers no doubt, hoping for luck. Hemingway went “across the river and into the trees” at the age of 62, but by that age his body and mind were battered and used up. His books are very unfashionable these days, thanks largely to the militant feminization of academe over the last few decades, but the pendulum will swing back, inevitably, and he’ll be lauded again.
