Burgers in Atomic City

Arco, Idaho

We like this little Kampground of America (KOA) a lot. They let us wash the Toyota and RV, they have a happy hour where travelers get together to talk at 3:30 and they serve ice cream at eight. They have a pool, cable TV, Wi-Fi, and big spaces. They're far enough off the little roads through town that there's no traffic noise. You can smell the rural cow and horse manure when it rains. We decide to spend an extra day to relax and read.

There are some really strange RVs in the US.

Arco is a very small town. I drove through it four times looking for a grocery store to buy wine, mayonnaise, sweet pickles and onions for a salmon salad. Finally, I stopped at the place where they serve Atomic Burgers and got directions. This is the first city in the world to be powered by an atomic reactor.

We went to visit EBR-1. It was the world's first atomic reactor. It was an experimental breeder reactor that produced more fuel than it used. It came online in 1951. LBJ declared the reactor to be a National Monument in 1967 after it became hopelessly obsolete.

When they started EBR-1 up, a spike in the nuclear reaction in seconds registered as a dangerous hyperbolic curve. The engineer in charge shouted for a shutdown, but he used language that was misunderstood. After a few more seconds the reactor scrammed itself automatically.

They shipped 148 tons of radioactive waste from Three Mile Island out here to be buried. We read in the Monument that there are huge underground rivers flowing through here which emerge as springs that empty into the Snake River and flow into the Columbia. Hopefully, the burial containers won't leak anytime soon. These light bulbs were illuminated in 1951 by U-235 fuel rods, turbines, liquid sodium and other high tech gadgets.

In 1949, when I was in the 1st grade, they gave us a newspaper called the Weekly Reader. At the time we were optimistic about nuclear power. We read about using atomic bombs to build canals, electrical power too cheap to meter and the coming revolution in fusion power. We could go to a shoe store in any small town and see green and white X-ray images of our tiny feet. Sometimes they talked about "duck and cover".

These are prototypes of atomic aircraft engines. They are 25 feet tall and appear to weigh 200 tons each. One can only surmise that they intended to miniaturize them.

Hell's Canyon & The Craters of the Moon

Along the Snake River
East Oregon and South Idaho

We did the 200 mile Hell's Canyon scenic loop yesterday. We saw miles of fertile farmland and winding US Forest Service roads.

Hell's Canyon is the deepest gorge in America at 1.5 miles deep. It was formed as part of an arc of undersea volcanic mountains in the South Pacific about 300 million years ago. Limestone rocks formed over the igneous rock on the sea bottom.The chunk of tectonic plate floated 2,000 miles north and collided with America. A vast uplifting and new igneous rock intrusions then took place amid considerable volcanism. During the ice ages, vast lakes in Montana repeatedly broke though glaciers and formed rivers with 1,000 times the volume of all the present day rivers in the world...at least so say the geologists. A strange and twisted history...geologic time runs on a different scale than human time.

Lewis and Clark crossed the Rockies and made their was down the Clearwater River to the Snake and then on to the Columbia.
I was a little surprised to see the Snake flowing north, but the Columbia is that way so it makes a certain sense. Lewis and Clark passed by here in the summer of 1804. The dams and locks make the rivers much easier to navigate for the most part.

These wild blackberries along the riverbank were very good.

Today was a fantastic driving day. Mrs. Phred did most of it. I discovered my old box of compilation CDs that I made while drinking Wild Turkey, late at night, back when I had to work. We turn it up and listen to Pink Floyd, Alvin Lee, The Stones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Credence Clearwater, Hot Tuna, Santana, The Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, The Platters, Randy Newman, Jimmi Hendrix, ZZ Top, etc. and watch the mountains, rivers and Idaho farmland roll by. For a change we hit the road at 6AM and make 450 miles by 3PM. The drive to the Grand Tetons tomorrow will only be a few hours more.

Suddenly we run into a blizzard of yellow grasshoppers in Idaho. Smack! Smack! All over the windshield. Just past that we drive through the the hundreds of square miles of The Craters of the Moon National Monument. Strangely, I'd been trying to remember the name of this place and where it was located for several days....there it was.
Blasted, torn, jagged black lava as far as the eye can see. Totally worthless desolate wasteland. What genius it was to turn it into a National Monument. I love it.

Our RV park is just down the road from Atomic City, the home of the first nuclear reactor in 1951. They have a couple of nuclear aircraft engines on display and Atomic Burgers...it's a must see in the morning.