Soda Springs, Idaho
Located in Caribou County. 4.59 Square Miles. Population 2,975
In the two and a half years we've been on the road, we've travelled through endless small towns from one end of the country to the other. There's always a Main Street. One stops sign or two. Perhaps a traffic light. Sometimes quaint. Often struggling. These are the streets of someone's life.
They are sturdy little things, these towns. Despite the cracking, peeling signs and the occasional boarded up buildings, they house all the necessities of an American life.
There's always a diner. At least one grassy square with Monuments to the town's war dead. Most assuredly a baseball field, a fire station, a drug store & a gas station - either shiny new or one with ancient pumps, depending on it's proximity to the nearest highway. There is often an aging auto repair shop, railroad tracks, if not a railroad station, a small town hardware store, alongside a flower shop and a little place that boasts a little bit of this and little bit of that, with a hodgepodge of collectibles and oddities in the window.
These little towns usually have a small historical society, a modest library. And some kind of factory or industry - the industry that either founded the town, saved the town, sustains the town, or is in the process of revitalizing the town. In Soda Springs, it is a Monsanto fertilizer plant and a Gypsum plant. In other towns, it's the local meat processing plant, the Del Monte canning facility, or the paper mill. These are places that keep the town afloat, that sponsor the 4th of July parade, and that give folks somewhere to go each morning, and somewhere to return home from each afternoon.
If you visit in the summer, you will still see the vestiges of the most recent 4th of July proudly adorning houses and mailboxes. Posters for the upcoming local county fair are posted in shop windows, promising unimaginable fun and excitement - not to mention the crowning of the prize-winning heifer and best-of-show zucchini.
But over and above these things, that are staples of small town America in the warm days of summer, each small town seems to boast some special thing. Some geographic oddity, some small piece of celebrity, or history, or Americana to draw you into town. Something they can put on a small brown sign. Something to be proud of.
In Soda Springs, Idaho it's the Soda Springs Geyser.
Soda Springs derived it's name from the hundreds of springs of carbonated water that are located around the town. In the middle 19th century, they were a well known stop along the Oregon Trail. In the city's heyday, the carbonated water was bottled in a local factory and sold as a popular "soda water" that put the town on the map.
The famous Soda Springs Geyser was not an attraction when the early pioneers stopped at the famous "Soda Springs" on their way across the West. The geyser is, instead, an unintended man-made attraction, unleashed when the town fathers were looking to tap into the hot springs for a "hot pool" bathing attraction in 1934, and instead drilled into a chamber of highly pressurized carbon dioxide gas and cold water, releasing the massive geyser, that flooded the down town area as it ran for weeks to the astonishment of locals.
The town fathers got their tourist attraction - although not the one they originally intended. The geyser was eventually capped and "manually" released to the delight of visitors. Today it is let loose every hour on the hour by a timed release valve and both locals and tourists alike, gather each hour to await the show. According to the interpretive signs at the attraction, the geysers height and volume has not decreased after many years.
Here are some additional photos from our brief stopover in Soda Springs, Idaho.
Hail to small town America.....
