On the Way to the Grand Canyon

June 9, 2011

Our route took us soutwest on I-44 to Oklahoma City and then I-40 across Oklahoma, the panhandle region of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and into Arizona (a mispelling of "Arid Zone", which is a better name for it. West of Albuquerque we ran into intense smoke from the wild fires on the Arizona-new Mexico border. We were afraid that Bluewater Lake, where we intended to camp for the night, would still be in the smoke. Fortunately, it was just beyond the smoke, although we could see it in the distance. The next morning the skies were clear, so the winds must have shifted and blown the smoke somewhere else.

A stop on our journey to the Grand Canyon was Meteor Crater, a short distance off I-40 in Arizona.








Meteor Crater is a bonafide crater created by meteor impact some 50,000 years ago. The crater is about 4000 feet in diameter and about 550 feet deep. Alex and Zack dubbed it "The Big Hole in the Ground".








Alex and Zack using sight tubes to see identify objects at the bottom of the crater. The crater was used for astronaut training during the Apollo program. It was also the site for an unsuccessful mining attempt to mine the iron in the meteor that created the crater.

In addition to the crater, there is a museum devoted to meteors and similar topics. The boys really liked the simulator that produced computer simulations of craters made by meteors of different sizes and on different planets. We had to drag them (so-to-speak) out of there to continue on our trip to the Grand Canyon.