On the way back from Malad we stopped at the Hagerman Arts and Crafts fair.  This is held at the bottom of the Snake River Canyon in the Thousand Springs area.  You have to park on top of the canyon and board a school bus which takes everyone down the steep, winding road to the bottom of the canyon.

You go down the cliffs seeing lots of waterfalls springing out of the top layer of lava (all the melted snow and rainfall in central & eastern Idaho percolates down through the lava to an impermeable layer and flows west underground until it hits where the Snake River carved down through the layers to make the canyon), then the water springs out along the sides of the cliffs as waterfalls.  You also see the fish hatcheries that take advantage of the clean, clear water (on the interstate there is a sign that campers to the Bliss area need to beware of alligators because alligators are kept here to eat the dead fish).

Arriving at the bottom you see the power generating station (built to look like a one-story castle for some reason).

Across the bridge are the craft & food booths.  We really enjoyed the folk, bluegrass, and jazz music while we had lunch.

Just regular artsy/crafty stuff – except there was also a Hagerman Monument Ranger who had a display of fossils of ice age animals, apparently all found in this area.

He had a giant sloth’s fingernail that was as big as my hand, a saber tooth tiger skull, a camel femur, a Hagerman horse femur with hoof (which is equivalent to the nail on one finger), a horse skull, a mastodon vertebrae, and a wooly mammoth tooth (flat grinder surface-grazer like a cow-on left hand side) as compared to a mastodon tooth (cusped tearing surface-browser like a deer-on right hand side).  The Hagerman area is famous for all the Hagerman Horse fossils you can dig up here (this was once the edge of Lake Idaho and the small horses would get stuck in the mud and die, or be killed coming down to drink).   The Hagerman horse had evolved to only needing one toe to run on but you could still see the remains of the other “finger” bones fused on the femur (when we went to the John Day fossil beds in Oregon they had more primitive horses which were about the size of a dog which still ran on several toes).  We wanted to go hiking to look for fossils but the ranger said that the fire danger had been so great this year that the area was closed.  Anyway-a lovely spot with water so crystal clear that you could see the fish swimming below you.