Arizona Trip Post #3: Meteor Crater, Petrified National Forest

We left the Grand Canyon and drove southeast, in order to first visit Meteor Crater. This is the first site that was identified as having been created from an impact meteor crater. The meteor was hit the earth around 50,000 years ago. It is nearly a mile across and over 550 feet deep! I think that the things which really helped me get a sense of scale were the telescopes at the top of the crater. Some of the things in the crater that were clearly visible within the telescope were hardly visible with the naked eye.

Sam loved seeing the crater and said that this was one of his favorite things that we got to do on the trip. Lucy didn't care so much about the crater, but she loved all of the steps and ramps that led you around the site and Visitor's Center building. She really liked the film that was introduced information about the crater. She kept loudly saying "Crash!" and "Boom!" when we watched simulations of the meteor hitting the ground.

After we left the crater, we drove to the Petrified Forest National Park. As we pulled off of the highway, we traveled through the town of Holbrook on Route 66. We immediately noticed that the Wigwam Motel and noted how similar it looks to the Cozy Cone Motel in the Pixar movie Cars. It turns out that this movie did serve as the inspiration for the movie, and then even have old classic cars sitting outside the teepee structures that have the names of Cars characters on the license plates. If I had known about this, I would have changed our motel plans so we could have spent a night here!

We arrived at Petrified Forest National Park in the early afternoon. This area is full of unique natural features partly because during the Triassic Period, this area was a tropical forest. After the continents split, this tropical forest drifted to what is known as current-day Arizona. At some point, the trees were buried, then covered with volcanic ash which helped to prompt the petrification of the logs, and now these logs are visible today due to erosion.

We decided to hike several of the trails in the park. First we took the Long Logs trail loop at the Visitors Center, and then we went to the Crystal Forest (shown below) to look at some of the logs which have petrified with sparkly bits of quartz.

The Blue Mesa was my favorite section of the park. We did only part of this trail, because we needed to get to the Painted Desert before the part closed. But I really loved the stripes and lines that were created by deposits of blue, purple, green and black mudstones with sedimentary rock. We often kept commenting that we felt we were like we were visiting other planets that are featured in Star Wars movies, because the landscape looked so unique and unfamiliar. J and I also joked that the Blue Mesa was Nature's manifestation of Color Field painting.

The last section of the Petrified National Forest is called the Painted Desert. We decided to hike the rim trail here, in order to get some spectacular views of the red and white hills below.

We left the park as the sun was going down, and we got to see some really lovely views of the Arizona sky as we drove west toward Sedona.