July 17th – Needles, CA to Holbrook, AZ and Meteor Crater

This was a relatively slow day. We had to recover a bit after that heat from yesterday! We left Needles, crossed the Colorado River into Arizona and basically drove along the interstate due east until just past Flagstaff. Here is the Barringer Meteor Crater, about 1km wide and approximately 100m deep (compared with surrounding plains). It’s a privately owned and operated site (amazingly enough) so it was a little pricey. We also arrived too late for the rim hike (which is the only way to see the crater besides the observation deck by the interpretive center). The interpretive center had a lot of information about meteors and asteroids and past collisions with Earth. But the crater itself stole the show! Different layers of rock was exposed on impact and some of the softer stone has been eroding. Barringer, for whom the crater was named, spent over 25 years trying to mine the crater in the early 1900’s; he was convinced there would be an iron deposit left from the meteorite. Unfortunately, he was wrong about that, but he did do a lot to convince the scientific community that this crater had been a meteorite impact and not volcanic in origin.