City of Rocks.

In south-central Idaho, not far from the borders of what are now Utah and Nevada, is a monumental place called City of Rocks. Nowadays, it is a National Reserve overseen by the National Park Service and the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation. In times past, it was a landmark through which most California-bound travelers passed after leaving the trail along the Snake River to reach the Humboldt River.

Photographs do not do it justice, as they fail to capture the scale of the rocks that give the place its name. Suffice it to say they are—to use the word in its proper sense—awesome.

We have visited City of Rocks before, but this time we traveled the Backcountry Byway from Oakley, Idaho to enter from the less-traveled west side of the park. It amounted to driving forty miles of bad road (fourteen, really, but it seemed longer) to get there, but it was worth the trip.

Despite other sightseers and several rock climbers scaling the monoliths, City of Rocks is so quiet and isolated and so little changed from days gone by that one can still imagine the wonderment of the Shoshoni and Bannock Indians who frequented the area, and the emigrants who scratched their names in the granite.