Weird day trips from Boise
The strangest Boise finds are often a short drive out. These 11 day trips — Bigfoot & Marie Dorian Statues at Old Fort Boise Replica, Cowboy Muffler Man, Bruneau Dunes State Park and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.
-
Bigfoot & Marie Dorian Statues at Old Fort Boise Replica
On the lawn beside a wooden replica of Old Fort Boise stand two cement figures, dedicated in 1974 by Idaho's…
-
Cowboy Muffler Man
A 22-foot fiberglass giant looms over an RV park just off Interstate 84, one of the surviving 'Muffler Men' c…
-
Bruneau Dunes State Park
This park holds the tallest single-structured sand dune in North America, a 470-foot mountain of sand rising…
-
Silver City
Roughly seventy weathered 1800s structures still stand in this remote Owyhee Mountains mining town, never tur…
-
Kirkham Hot Springs
A short staircase off Highway 21 drops down to a cluster of rock-walled soaking pools perched right on the ed…
-
Balanced Rock
A 40-ton, roughly 48-foot-tall slab of volcanic rock sits impossibly atop a pedestal only about three feet by…
-
Little City of Rocks
This BLM wilderness study area is packed with hoodoos, mushroom caps, spires and natural arches eroded out of…
-
Bruneau Dunes State Park Observatory
Sixty miles southeast of Boise, this state park sits under skies so dark it earned International Dark Sky Par…
-
Parma Motor-Vu Drive-In
A family-run single-screen drive-in on Highway 95 that has been flickering to life since 1953, one of the las…
-
Lawson's Emu-Z-Um (Lawson's Legacy Museum)
A sprawling private museum about 60 miles south of Boise that grew from four rooms into more than 50, each cr…
-
Idaho's Mammoth Cave & Shoshone Bird Museum of Natural History
A classic high-desert roadside stop eight miles north of Shoshone on Highway 75, where a self-guided lava-tub…