Meteor Crater is a great afternoon stop in between Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon. Located in Winslow, Arizona, it’s also an easy drive for an afternoon trip from Holbrook, Arizona (Painted Desert) … well, typically it is an easy drive.
On Wednesday, after the snowfall, we climbed in the car, excited to check out Meteor Crater. We drove down the road out of the RV park to find bumper to bumper parked semi-trucks and cars. Not to be deterred, we used the GPS to guide us through another route towards the highway. At one point, we ended up driving through water so deep that it would have swallowed up any cars trying to traverse this road. On the other side, we found more bumper to bumper semis. John took a stroll down the road as the highway entrance was within sight and returned with bad news: several accidents had closed down the only highway headed in that direction which explained all the semi-trucks.
We recalibrated our plans, choosing to enter Petrified Forest through their northern entrance and rescheduling our day at Meteor Crater. As we drove up the highway in the other direction, we saw trucks parked everywhere - on the side of the road, all over gas stations, and in the middle of the road. It was too cold to turn off the heater, so we said a little prayer that all the trucks had a full fuel tank entering this fiasco. Driving north, we saw parked trucks on the highway for literally fifteen miles; it was the strangest sight!
The History of Meteor Crater
Approximately 50,000 years ago, a meteor raced towards the earth with harrowing speed. It moved at such a pace (26,000 miles per hour) that one could fly from LA to NYC in 15 minutes flat. The impact was akin to an explosion of 20 million tons of TNT, changing the terrain forever. Some of the rock from the bottom of the earth now resides at the top of the crater with large chunks, some the size of a house, thrown atop the red rock. The bottom of the crater is one mile wide and could hold 20 football fields and 20 million spectators. While we were there, John threw a snowball in the crater and the kids were amazed to see it disappear and create a real picture for the scope of the crater.
A man name Franklin is credited with first discovering the crater in 1871. As with much of our natural wonders, it is more likely that the Native Americans made the discovery at a much earlier date. It was first thought to be formed by a volcano due to the unusual mineral deposits (iron and nickel were found in the meteorites). In 1902, a mining engineer visited the site to see if he could mine for iron. He spent the next 26 years searching for a hidden, giant iron meteorite. It is now thought that most of the meteor disintegrated. Barringer’s relabeling of the crater as bring caused by a meteor, not a volcano, paved the way for geologists to finally understand and identify meteor craters.
The museum contains a ten-minute movie explaining the origin story, a small museum, and a 4D theater experience. Inside the museum, the kids were amazed to see the magnetic properties of a meteor crater and enjoyed the interactive exhibits. The 4D theater was a real blast flying into the crater and up into space to save the earth from an asteroid collision. There are also guided rim tours available, but these were not running during the winter months. This was one of our more expensive activities ($83 for the four of us) for a few hours, but it felt worthwhile for us to experience.
Time to blast off towards Tuba City, Arizona!
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