Backstory on 17 Min. Shoshone Ice Caves (Idaho)
For years I’ve wanted to stop and explore the Idaho crossroads town of Shoshone, but it’s one of those places between here and there that goes by much too fast from the car window. Although I’m typically inclined to make urban collages, there is something about such places that always calls out to this long-ago, small town girl from Virginia. And this one has it all: the vintage passenger train station with a crooked sign, the red water tower, the little boys chasing colorful freight trains that whiz through several times a day, old vehicles, and friendly people in the Ironhorse Saloon, who lamented that I had arrived too late to see the football homecoming parade that afternoon. Undaunted, they consoled me over a beer with stories about historic landmarks built from local lava rock, and made sure I knew that another train was due to pass by in an hour.
This collage is built on top of my favorite feature of the town--a huge, peeling, many-layered, hand-painted sign which is itself a vintage collage, announcing to all who wait in their cars for the train to pass: 17 min. Shoshone Ice Caves. It consists of somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 layered and blended pieces from 38 individual photographs (out of hundreds taken), including one for Manhatten Cafe [sic], which I found while staying in Stanley at Danner’s Log Cabin Motel. Turns out the owner, who collected the fabulous old signs decorating those cabins, grew up in Shoshone.