Meteor Crater

On the second of our holiday days, we jumped in the car early and headed eastwards. It became a bit of a standing joke between Noleine and I to suggest we were going to Albuquerque, because it’s such a querque name (and the I40/Route 66 on which we were travelling does lead there eventually). As we escaped the hills around Flagstaff we hit the flat Arizona desert, with hints of hillocks on the hazy horizon (it’s not often that one can alliterate with h’s, but this has clearly been an aspirational goal of mine!).

Our first stop for the day was Meteor Crater, which is a massive hole in the ground caused by a meteor impact. It is about 1.6km across and close to 200m deep. If you look at the first photo below you can see some features at the centre of the crater, including a white patch which is a fenced compound that will be a focus of the following photo.

The astronaut cut-out is about 2m tall and the flag is the same size as the ones placed on the moon (about 1m x 1.5m). There is a shaft in the compound as there was a lot of early work trying to recover the original meteorite material (most of which just disintegrated on impact).

I think my lens might have been set at too wide an angle to get a really good panorama, which is why the “stitching” of the component photos is a bit obvious … but it still gives you a bit of a sense of the magnitude of the thing. There is a large boulder on the skyline about one-third of the way across the left half of the photo which is about the size of a house. 

The view below was taken from the visitors’ centre at the crater.

When we left we continued eastward across the barren plain, getting a small amount of amusement from overtaking the Mustang in the photo below in our small, hired Toyota Yaris (OHS police please note: I did not take this photo!).