Day 32 Saturday 10 -10 -15 Meteor Crater-Petrified Forrest-Painted Desert

There are numerous species of pine in Arizona.  This rare species is the Cellphone Pine.  Its distinctive features are the smooth metallic like bark, the nearly perfect round cross-section, a flawless straight trunk with its high antenna ridden branches, and lack of pine cones.   I have in fact seen one of these near Philadelphia.

This morning we went shopping for a charger for the laptop.  After several phone calls to computer experts and driving to one only to find it closed the light bulb lit.  Let’s try Staples.  Voilà! They had a universal that fits.

Linda was amazed by the number of
trucks on the highway

On the road at last we are eastbound on I-40 to the Meteor Crater.   Wow, that is some hole!  4/5^th of a mile wide and 700 feet deep.  If the Washington Monument were standing on the floor of the crater and you were standing at the first visitor platform you would be even with the top of the monument.   The floor is large enough to hold 20 football fields and if the walls were stadium seating it would hold 2 million people!

It is believed the meteor hit about 50,000 years ago at a speed of around 26,000 MPH.  That is slightly above the Arizona speed limit of 75MPH.

 

 

 

 



At the far right of the center, the white area is a fenced in
yard.  Can you see the astronaut and flag?

Now can you see him?



Zoom 20X



Zoom 40X.  The astronaut is 6 feet high.



The square rock on the rim is the size
of a house.

 

There is a section dedicated to the US Astronauts with a Hall of Fame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A space alien?

This looks like a mural painted on
the wall.  In fact it is a window in the
brick wall looking back at the
San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continuing east on I-40 we went to the Petrified Forrest and Painted Desert National Parks.  This area is rich in fossils.

Junior archeologist dig in a sandbox
to find hidden bones.

  
As trees became buried underground the mineral rich moisture saturated the trunks and replaced the organic material with mineral deposits.  This turned the trees of that time into stone.  Some are rough and some are polished over time.  There are some that you can vaguely pick out some of the rings.  
 

 

 

The Petrified Forrest and the Painted Desert kind of meld into one another.  Traveling the road through the park you see all kinds of interesting and striking color combinations.

The Painted Desert had a fresh coat of paint so you couldn’t walk on it.  But I got some pictures.  The high cirrus clouds covered the sun just as I was starting to video so some of the colors are not a sharp as I had hoped.

A relic from the Route 66 days

  
 

 
 
 

 

 
 

 

Tonight we are staying in Holbrook.  Tomorrow we will head south toward Tucson.