In order to get a decent parking place near the island in the Snake River from which the display is launched, we arrived 5 hours early and killed time with our iPads and portable Internet hotspot. The people watching was fine. The weather - warm but not hot or humid and no mosquitoes, an essentially perfect "shirt-sleeves" evening.
Melaleuca, a pyramid marketing scheme not unlike Amway or Tupperware is headquartered in Idaho Falls. Every year they bring their top sellers to headquarters for Fourth of July festivities which include a banquet, awards ceremony, and some of the best fireworks anywhere.
Although the fireworks are staged by and for the Melaleuca folks, it is the nature of fireworks that everybody within a a couple of miles can see them too. Out of this fact Melaleuca wisely makes a benefit by inviting the community to join them in patriotic celebration, including a simultaneous FM radio broadcast of patriotic music, largely by country and western performers.
i can't tell you how many individual aerial displays they launch, I'm always too busy watching the spectacle to count them. What follows is an admittedly imperfect estimate. For twenty minutes beginning at 10 p.m., there are 2-3 exploding every couple of seconds or roughly 1200-1800 individual fireworks - the subjective experience is one of riches, of opulence, of wonderful excess, of whatever the polar opposite of stinginess might be. The other DrC has a photo at her blog.
It is hands down the best fireworks I've ever seen anywhere and it happens here where we can see them most years. The crowd watching is interesting too. Vast numbers of children of all ages, from newborns on their first outing to shyly courting teenagers and they are largely well-behaved. This is part of what I call "the Mormon West," not Utah but it might as well be. Big families are the rule, not the exception. Extended family groups of up to four generations who actually get along with each other.
