| Welcome | About | Software | Links | Site News |
Celebration Park is the northwestern end of a roadless section of the Snake River Birds of Prey area. This Canyon County, Idaho, Park has been improved with a small interpretive center, campgrounds, and signed trails. The park includes petroglyphs and large melon gravel (many huge boulders) as well as a desert lake and other archeological and historical sites.
Swan Falls is about 20 miles south of Boise in a steep gorge of the Snake River. There is a small grassy park at the Idaho Power Plant. You will find boat ramps both above and below the dam. Swan Falls is an excellent place for winter hiking and bicycling, because of the mild weather. Young children will enjoy exploring the boulder fields. You can cross the dam's catwalk to hike or bike to the Wees Bar Petroglyphs, to Sinker Creek, or up to Sinker Butte, which is an inactive volcano. You can launch a raft or jet boat to float the river down to Celebration Park. Swan falls is also a great place to watch the nesting birds of pray and waterfowl and for photography. You will also find informal, unimproved camp sites here. Because of the heat, Swan Falls is best visited in spring or fall.
The Mud Flat Road starts at Grandview, traverses the Owyhee Canyonlands, and ends up more than a hundred miles away at Jordan Valley, Oregon. If you want to get away from it all, this is the place. (I've hiked in the Deep Creek area for four days over a past Memorial Day weekend without seeing a soul!)
The page shown here consists of a few waypoints and many high-resolution images of wildflower taken on a family automobile trip along the eastern section of the Mud Flat Road near Grandview. (This page should only be opened if you have a high speed internet connection and lots of time!). MudFlatRoad.html contains many high-resolution pictures taken by Cheri, Dave, and Rachel Wissenbach of Purple Sage, Rock Rose, Cactus, Lupine, Peony, and many other species and will take forever to download and view. Cheri counted 40 flowering species in all, in the elevation range from 3000 to 6000 feet.
This trail is a short desert hike of about three miles, one way, in Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument. You won't see any fossils on this hike.
Massacre Rocks State Park near American Falls, Idaho, is a historical site as well as an excellent place for bird watching, canoeing, hiking, and family camping. The park is open for camping all year. The park staff is personable and professional, with one weakness--they like to play dress-up. Over labor day weekend we were entertained in the program area on successive evenings by a pioneer woman in sunbonnet and long dress talking about Oregon trail history from a woman's perspective, by a mountain man complete with fringed bucksin, long knife, and percussion muzzle-loading rifle (which he actually loaded and fired) and by a magician who talked about geology and park history.