August 14th Last day in Grand Teton and travel to Craters of the Moon National Monument

We were hooked up and pulling out of our campground by 7:30am. Our plan was to travel through the "Antelope Flats" section of Grand Teton NP in the hope of spotting the park's bison herd before heading over the mountains towards Idaho. We traveled quite a few miles on the "Antelope Flats" road without seeing any buffalo so we were beginning to think we'd been skunked when we turned a corner and met up with the herd! Like in Custer and Yellowstone the bison are free roaming so they were on the road, on the side of the road and crossing the road. It was a striking sight to see them with the beautiful Grand Teton range as a backdrop and I was sad to be leaving them as I knew that this was the last time we'd see bison on this trip.
By mid morning we were heading over the mountains towards Idaho. We took Route 22 which was pretty darn scary! Major switchbacks, 10% grades and steep drop offs (there were guardrails though). I was very relieved when we finally made it to the valley in Idaho. Our commute from then on was easy. We passed through INL territory (Idaho National Laboratory) which is 85% the size of Rhode Island and appears to be very well guarded. Not a place I'd want to break down in! As we neared Craters of the Moon National Monument we began to see basalt / lava rocks in the ranch lands and once we got to the monument we felt that we'd been transported to another world. We secured a campsite and parked our Airstream on it's black cinders and after we completed setting up we decided to explore the loop road as was only 16 miles round trip. One of the first stops on the loop road was the Inferno Cone which we climbed. It was a short, steep walk up the side of the cone and once we got there the wind was so strong we could lean into it without falling over! From the top of the cone we could see other cinder cones lined up along the Great Rift. It was an awesome sight. After we climbed back down we continued our drive of the loop road stopping to view two splatter cones along the way. One of the splatter cones had snow and ice at the very bottom, boy were we ever surprised to see this because the lava rock that is exposed to the sun can heat up to 150 degrees during the day. After we completed our drive we enjoyed dinner outside on our picnic table and then attended a 7:00pm ranger walk and the 9:00pm ranger talk before retiring for the evening.