Location Taken: Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho
Time Taken: June 2010
Every so often, you come across something that just reminds you how tenacious, how persistent, how vivacious life is.
Like these pretty flowers, growing along the edge of an asphalt road.
In the middle of a volcanic wasteland.
You see those black pebbles on the part that’s not the road? That’s not stones that fell off the edge of the asphalt. It’s the terrain the road’s built on. Craters of the Moon National Monument is full of lava flows and splatter cones and above all, cinder cones.
Cinder cones are mountains of ash and pebbles of the volcanic rocks. Most of which are on the black side in color. The ground is filled with those black stones, rising and falling in the gentle hills of the quickly collapsing cones. It is as barren a wasteland as you could imagine.
And yet, in that most unlikely of places, right next to yet another things usually antithetical to life, a road, there is a strip of colorful flowers.
Perhaps they grow here because the rise of the road blocks the wind from blowing away the seeds. Or perhaps it collects water from the air, scarce in this harsh landscape.
Whatever the case, here they grow, and they will not let anything keep them from growing in this tiny oasis of life.
