How to do the great American road trip: Idaho and Utah

Nothing prepared us for the mountain vistas of Utah; not Yellowstone, not Glacier National Park, nor any of the magnificent scenic areas we had visited on the first four months of our grand US RV tour.

Utah took the sum of all that we had witnessed on the initial 4,635 miles from Florida to America’s Great West and turned it into an elegant equation of ultimate grandeur, a mountainous melting pot for the ages.

Our usual WPMs (Wows Per Minute) were replaced by OMGs as we encountered a spectacular mix of 12 national parks and monuments that simply demanded we recalibrate our vocabulary and turn it all the way up to 11.

We’d had a pretty good tune-up, mind you. After leaving the wilds of beautiful, immense Wyoming behind, we had reached southern Idaho – via motorways I-80 and I-84 – and two unique geological marvels that immediately set our pulses racing as they filled our windscreen, twin exemplars of what was to come.

City of Rocks National Reserve presented an outlandish terrain of granite monoliths several hundred feet high and spread across 58.3kmsq, a rocky labyrinth of bewildering proportions but ideal for rockbclimbers and hikers alike. For once, our luck with the weather went awry, though – a sudden, huge thunderstorm sent us scrambling for cover.

Happily, we discovered the pizza perfection of Rock City Mercantile in the adjacent town of Almo and devoured a magnificent 12-inch pizza, washed down by two excellent craft ales from the local Highlander Beer brewery, as we sat in our car and let the lightning rage around us.

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The next day took us to another planet. Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve burst out of the ground like the lunar landscape that inspired its name. Here, amid 15,000-year-old cinder cones, lava tubes and volcanic discharge, we goggled at the dark, alien shapes that proliferated across the 85km Great Rift, a lurking subterranean fissure that remains dormant but not extinct.

The tumultuous Snake River, a historic waterway that has sliced a startling 128km canyon through the basaltic substrata, also cut right across our route. The city of Twin Falls, where Evel Knievel famously failed to leap the 490-metre width in 1974, straddles the canyon at one point.