Finding Bone

 
Several years ago we heard of a hamlet called Bone, Idaho...and today we went there! When I say hamlet, picture teeny tiny. I think we saw exactly one building in “central” Bone, and only a few ranches in “greater” Bone. Bone does not even have a town sign telling you the population or the elevation. What it does have is a well maintained dirt road named guess what -- “Bone Road.” The folks out here are creative when it comes to naming streets?!

While trying to find Bone, we came across some sandhill cranes.

We drove through miles of empty land...no telephone poles, no electric wires, and no traffic! It was something else.

We saw pretty barns,

and tired cabins

and a fence style we had not seen before...not a buck and rail fence, but a buck and barbed wire fence...when the ground is too hard to dig holes for fence posts, crossed beams are raised...and normally between the crossed beams are wooden rails. This fence had the crossed beams, but that’s where the similarity ended.

The land is mainly used for grazing, and we saw some cow-calf operations. Once in a while a cow would look at us, but mainly they sat in the meadows and ignored us.

There were not a lot of flowers in bloom as this is the season when the flowers are going to seed. We did some some magnificent plants, including this one. I have no idea what it is, but it’s evil looking. I sure would hate to see this guy growing in my yard.

About a mile from Bone, we saw an old white schoolhouse sitting by the Flying Hearts Ranch. On the front of the building, was a sign exclaiming it as Glennore School, 1916-1939,

Then the road changed. The dirt was replaced with pavement! Civilization was encroaching upon this lonely and lovely place. There was a turbine farm of all things!

Huge, white turbines with 3-bladed propellers were planted in the fields. Then came more houses...and finally the “city” of Ammon, ID a few miles from Idaho Falls.

The last building we saw harked back to earlier times. It was a Pillsbury grain elevator, very similar to the grain elevators that are common in Canada.

Once in Idaho Falls, we went about our business--as though we had not traveled about 65 miles on a dirt road that went through some mighty pretty country!