Visited Meteor Crater
On the way to Santa Fe, we visited Meteor Crater, a gigantic meteor imapct crater in the Arizona desert. It is 500 feet deep and nearly three-quarters of a mile wide:
It's kind of impossible to communicate how big the crater is with photographs, because it's also kind of hard to see how big it is in person. The crater lacks many good visual indicators for scale, so it almost looks smaller than it really is. It wasn't until our tour guide began pointing out small pieces of debris in the basin of the aircraft - abandoned mines, the wing of a crashed airplane, etc - that I realized how large the crater actually is.
The crater is privately owned by a group of families. Some of these families are the descendants of the people who purchased the land around the crater for cattle ranching, while the last family consists of people descended from the mining engineer who first tried searching for a meteor inside the crater. He apparently spent decades, and half a million dollars in back-then money, searching all over the crater for the gigantic pile of iron be believed he'd find underneath it. Unfortunately the iron meteorite actually completely exploded on impact, so there's nothing in the crater to find.
At some point, the families with ownership stakes in the crater realized that they could turn it into a major tourist attraction. They built a big museum on the rim and filled it with meteor-related science-museum exhibits. The funny thing is that they originally asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design the museum, but he designed something too enormous and deranged and ambitious to safely construct on the crater rim, which is all crumbled blown-apart rock. The actual sketches he submitted are framed on the wall of the museum outside the gift shop:
It was apparently supposed to look like a meteor striking the earth.
There are other things I saw in Arizona and New Mexico that I'd like to upload, but Bear is not acceping most image uploads from me at the moment. So you'll have to enjoy the one picture I managed to squeak in here before giving up for the night: this absolutely beautiful rest stop evacuation plan from a rest stop just inside the New Mexico border along Interstate 40:
It's a gorgeous piece of art, I think...