Southern Idaho is a GEM! | Box Canyon, Kayaking Blue Heart Springs, & Balanced Rock

After resuming full-time van life and spending some time hiking and eating delicious foods in New Mexico and Utah we have made our way north to Idaho. Idaho's nickname is the gem state and with gorgeous mountains, rivers, canyons, tons of waterfalls, hot springs, and so much more we think it's such an underrated gem. And for the next week we're going to try to explore as much of this beautiful state as we can and we can't wait to bring you along with us. Welcome to Idaho. We're kicking off our time in Idaho in the southern part of the state which is more of a high desert climate. It's known for having tons of waterfalls and canyons. We drove through the area about a year ago when we were moving into our van and we have been so excited to come back. There was so much we did not get to do last time and so we're very excited to spend two full days here and we're kicking off this morning at Box Canyon State Park. This place is crazy. If you didn't know it was here you would have no idea. We just were driving on this farmland and all of a sudden there's like this little dirt gravel parking lot and there's a sign that says Box Canyon. We got out, we paid five dollars but there were no like envelopes to put the five dollars in so we just wrote a note. It was super casual and then we drove to the second parking lot which was closer to where like the actual trail begins. Yeah you park, you get out, you walk up to the overlook and bam it's this huge beautiful canyon gorge with water running through it. It's clear water. It's magical. You seriously would have no idea this was here. It just it took our breath away. Oh man we're so excited. So we're now in the canyon and we're trying to get to this waterfall that's somewhere close by we think because yeah this area like we said is known for waterfalls and this is going to be our first of many. This thing is crazy. Don't be fooled if you read about the waterfall on the internet somewhere and you see that it's only a 20 foot waterfall you might think it's dinky but you'll be wrong. It's mighty and powerful. It's absolutely beautiful. So the spring here at Box Canyon is actually the 11th largest spring in all of North America which is wild and this is one of the seven parks that makes up the thousand springs state park system. So we're visiting this one today and we're going to visit two more of them tomorrow. The trail down to the waterfall can be a little sketchy and a little tight with the overgrown bushes and it'll probably only take you about 10 to 12 minutes to get down there and we think you can keep going to check out more of the springs but we're about to get up close and personal with a different spring. All right see you later. Oh I'm in and I didn't flip. In case you can't tell we're going kayaking. So we're kayaking to the spot called Blue Heart Springs and if it looks anything like it looks in the photos and videos we've seen online it's going to be absolutely amazing. It's this super bright blue water. It looks like it, I don't even know, it looks like it belongs somewhere in like the Caribbean or something. It just looks so beautiful. It's about a mile to get to it and it should take us about an hour to paddle out there and we're going to be paddling along the Snake River. We're kind of by a canyon. Oh man this should be awesome. What a day too. The weather since we've been here is so awesome. It gets like in the 40s at night and then during the day it's like 70s. Actually the first day we got here it was kind of cloudy but man it's perfect today. I think we're almost there. It's gorgeous. Absolutely magical. It is crazy. When you're kayaking along the Snake River it's kind of this like milky green color then as you're getting closer on the right side it starts to turn this like blue really cool blue color and then all of a sudden you just pop into this little like cove nook and it's just like the deepest greens like it looks neon green right here and then over there it looks aqua blue. It's oh my gosh. It's so clear and beautiful water man. Oh it's so peaceful in here too. So pretty. Yeah when we got here there were some people here but now everyone's left so it's just us so we're just sitting here enjoying the view. I don't know if the camera is going to do it justice because the colors are just so vivid but we're hoping that the drone will do it justice but this is just really really pretty. Awesome. The green kind of looks like someone melted one of the green jolly ranchers and then the blue looks like one of the lakes in Canada. Who knew that this was in Idaho? This is crazy. This water is Faroican cold. We thought about getting in before we came here that's not happening. And back you go. We wanted to give a huge shout out to Bamberry Hot Springs for hooking us up with a kayak. That was so much fun and we highly recommend doing this if you are in southern Idaho. We got a good workout in. Muscles are feeling a little sore and we've also worked up quite an appetite for some ice cream. I think they saw us with the camera and the lady who runs the place and owns it. They're gonna take us in the back and show us how they make everything I guess. This is awesome. We just want an ice cream but this is even better. We start with the raw tank over there. That's our milk from our farm. That's a measuring stick and we can decide how many pounds of whichever kind of milk we're doing. Skim, 2%, whole, half and half, cream, chocolate milk. We blend up our chocolate milk in the sink, everything like that. That's our pasteurizer that we do our ice cream base mix in. So that's got the milk, the cream, the sugar, the powders, everything that goes into making ice cream. We started over in 2007 and remodeled it. Got some new stuff and brought everything up to code and started running as Globally Creamery in the fall of 07 until we went. Well that ice cream experience went from we were just excited about ice cream to one of the coolest experiences we've had in a long time. Probably up there with when we went to the North Carolina barbecue tour we did. We got the behind the scenes. Yeah, that was incredible. Thank you so much to everyone at Cloverleaf Creamery for showing us around and being so nice and welcoming. Oh my gosh, get ice cream starting to melt a bit. So we'll quickly tell you what we got. We got, we both got cowboy, well so we got two scoops but then you split them so we really got like four scoops. So we got the cowboy crunch which is like buttercream ice cream. I wish I had the list up right now. It's like buttercream ice cream, maybe some caramel and chocolate. Oh no, I'm having a mess right now. But it sounds really good. I got salted caramel and then I also got pralines and cream and I got like two of the cowboy crunch because it sounded the best. I got salted caramel, cowboy crunch, strawberry and elk tracks I think which is kind of like moose tracks but I think they call it elk tracks. Oh man, I had one, I had one bite. I don't even know what flavor it was and it was so good. Strawberries are legit. This is like a true creamery, like creamery. They make everything here, the milk and then the ice cream as well. Oh so good. He recommended going with like the simpler flavors, you know, to get the creaminess and the true flavor of it. I don't know what flavors I'm really eating but they just, they go, the ones I got go so well together. It's a really good combination. Oh shoot. All right, I think we're gonna put the camera down so we can devour this and not make a huge mess. You know we've kept saying we're in southern Idaho but we haven't actually told you much about the area that we're in so we decided we would show you on the map. So this is the wonderful state of Idaho and like we said we're in the southern part of the state so we are down here and to give you some reference Boise which is what we believe I think is the largest city in Idaho is just right up here northwest of where we are. So we've been hanging out mostly in this Twin Falls area which is the closest larger city to where we've been. Spent some time this week working over there and then this morning we started right here at Box Canyon and then we went to the Banbury Hot Springs to pick up our kayak. They look very close but we actually had to drive like all the way around to get to it and then we kayaked all the way up the Snake River to this little nook right here the Blue Heart Springs and then we came down here to Buell to get our ice cream at Cloverleaf Creamery and we're now headed right over here to a cool little spot called Balanced Rock. Keeping with the theme of today's vlog if you didn't specifically know to come to this place you would have no idea it's here. It's just so crazy you're just driving around the area and it's just regular old farmland and then all of a sudden there's a giant canyon in front of you and you find your place and bam it's awesome it's so wild it's cool. So this is Balanced Rock. You just park in the parking lot and it's like a five minute maybe walk up to it. I'm gonna cheat a little bit on the stats but it's over 48 feet tall it's 40 tons it's a wind carved rock that balances on a pedestal of only three feet by 17 inches. That's a huge mass on a tiny little thing. That's crazy. Our last activity of the day I am getting to play some golf. So the last time we were here I saw this course from the bridge up there we're at Canyon Springs golf course it's only 30 bucks it's in this canyon it's a freaking deal it's a beautiful day. I know many of you probably don't want to see me play 18 holes of golf so we'll do a really quick highlight reel hopefully including a hole-in-one. I definitely don't mind joining Adam for golf when the views look like this. This is sick. Ace cam is live. Good as new. Adam do you want to tell the vlog your score? No it's too embarrassing. Golf was awesome. Today was awesome. It was actually a gem of a first day of Idaho and we're sorry if we were a broken record about the adjectives describing everything but everything was just awesome. Yeah it was just beautiful, cool, crazy, wild, epic like every word we could think of it we probably said so we're sorry if we weren't very creative we'll work on some better words for tomorrow but we honestly were just speechless the whole day everything just blew our minds the scenery here is incredible and oh man it was so much fun but it's been a very very long day so we're gonna have a quick dinner and then we're gonna head to bed because we're getting up early to have more epic adventures in Idaho tomorrow.