Woke up in Bliss Idaho (which it isn't exactly). I was glad for that since it's where I went to sleep the night before. Bliss is on the edge of the Hagerman Valley, home of the Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument which was my destination for the morning. The Snake River runs through the valley and the fossil beds are found in the exposed bluff sides above the river. Needed to see the Hagerman Horse (Equus simplicidens), a very small horse from the Pliocene that's an ancestor of the modern horse. Photo above. Ran into Tom Nelson, paleontologist extraordinaire, at the interpretive center who was removing a fossil from rock (pic above) but who took the time to provide me a hook up at the Royal Tyrrell in Drumheller, Alberta. Thanks Tom. Can't wait to get there. As a bonus, the Oregon Trail is visible from a hiking trail in the Valley, although I couldn't get close enough to the actual trail (wagon ruts) for a meaningful photo. The Oregon Trail comes up again in a few lines. Found a cool lizard in the valley - a horned lizard (species unknown) that closely resembles the Texas horned lizard (horny toad) I played with as a child. Pic above. I don't think dinosaurs disappeared, they just shrank :-)
Pressing north I find the bucolic little town of Glenn's Ferry which is situated on the banks of the Snake River and home of the Carmela Vineyards which incorporate a golf course into the vineyard - tasting room at the 18th. A concept that could catch on. But I'm really interested in Glenn's Ferry because it's the gateway to Three Island Crossing State Park (although I would go back just for Carmela's Semillon), one of the Snake River crossings on the Oregon Trail. The interpretive center is top notch and graphically presents the hardships associated with moving enormous numbers of eastern Americans west to Oregon. I greatly appreciated the center's honest presentation of the effects of that immigration on the area's Native American population - decimating disease, land theft, disruption of entire cultures -Manifest Destiny my ass. Boise State University archaeologists were excavating in the Park, but all had left for the weekend so I missed getting to "commune with the cult" and peruse artifacts, etc. Last pic shows the tip of one of the islands in the Snake River that the immigrants used to "hopscotch" their way across to the north side.
Losing daylight but pressing into Oregon.
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