The Grand Adventure: Meteor Crater

It feels weird to write the date as 2025. It didn’t even feel like the passing of a year last night. There were no fireworks, no celebrations, no marking of an ending or beginning…no indication that it wasn’t a day like any other.

We are finally on our way home. Despite being sick, I still don’t want our adventure to end. Although, I seem to be alone in that category. Troy has been asking incessantly when we’ll be home. I’m not really sure what he’s homesick for. If it’s just the familiarity of his stuff around him, or if it’s for the monotonous routine that our life has become. It was inevitable that we’d be driving back to that life, but I don’t need the constant reminder that it’s coming soon. Troy keeps saying that he enjoyed Roswell the most of all the things we saw on this trip. I’m not sure if that’s because of the alien angle or because it was the closest place to our house.

We are headed to Albuquerque today, but I decided to throw in another unplanned activity on our way. So, we stopped at Meteor Crater just outside of Flagstaff. From a distance, the rising rim of rock debris looks like another distant mountain on the relatively flat horizon. But once you get to the top of the rim, the crater is immense, measuring one mile across and three miles around.

Meteor Crater is the site of the most perfectly intact impact crater in the world. It’s not the largest, but the others are under the water or covered in forests. Being in such an arid landscape has kept the site visible and clear. We took the guided tour, which takes you only about a quarter of a mile around the top, but it was filled with a lot of good information and history about the site. For example, the meteor that hit was estimated to be traveling about 26,000 miles per hour and hit with a force of a 20 megaton bomb. It left a crater approximately 700 feet deep. The impact was so hard that it actually lifted three layers of the earth into the air, flipped them over, and dropped them back down again. This process is called reverse stratigraphy. The meteor most likely exploded apart on impact, raining debris in a radius of some 15 miles away. The meteor was made up of 92% iron and nickel, which made it extremely heavy. They found one fragment a couple of miles away that weighed over 1400 lbs! Due to its chemical composition, the high metal content also makes the meteor crater site act like a giant lightning rod, attracting lightning strikes in droves during the storm season.

Troy didn’t truly appreciate the significance or wonder of the crater. All he wanted to know was what happened to the meteor. So, after a couple of hours, we headed on our way. We encountered some sweet rock formations and a beautiful sunset before we arrived at the hotel. We’re staying at a Home2 Suites, and it’s amazing! It’s by far the nicest hotel we’ve stayed in so far. It’s practically brand new, and everything is modern and updated. The room is huge, and we have a full kitchen and full-sized couch. I wish we’d had this place in the Grand Canyon. Oh, and they also had chocolate chip cookies when we came in.