Holy Meteor Crater Batman!

I hear my daughter up and about at 06:00. This is unheard of, at least four or five hours too early.

She's up because we are off on an Arizona Adventure.

We stop at the local McDonald's for a coffee and McMuffin, actually the first time I've eaten there since returning from Tonga. We peruse a WalMart road atlas and decide that today will be a visit to Winslow Arizona.

We cruise up I17 towards Flagstaff. As we go we gain altitude. Terrain changes from Saguaros to shrub junipers to flat dry expanses with nothing bigger than a weed. Volcanic mountains leap from the flat plains, many still sport expanses of snow, a sight for those of us used to 115 degree heat.

We head east following the route of the infamous Route 66. We turn at Meteor Crater road. In we drive across a flat red martian landscape. A prairie dog stands to watch us, then bolts for his burrow.

Ahead is a gray ridge rising from the red expanse. It is the ejecta from the crater.

We pay our $30 each and explore the museum and take a walk around part of the rim with a local guide. Most of the employees are Navajo. I am happy being surrounded by big brown friendly tattooed people again.

The crater is huge. The Washington Monument could stand in the bottom and not poke out the top. For a hundred years the consensus of the world's geologists was that it was a volcanic crater like the others in the area. A mining engineer found evidence that eventually proved that it was an impact crater, but the scientific community called him a fool for fifty years because they has a consensus. Sound familiar?

NASA trained the Apollo astronauts here and still trains their new astronauts in the crater.

The impact released the equivalent of 20 megatons of energy. Not too far up the road in New Mexico is another crater, this one at the Trinity Site. This is where the first atom bomb was tested. It released about one thousandth of the energy of the meteor. We are disappointed that we can't go stand in that crater, but it is only open two days a year, so that will have to wait until October.