A sequence of pictures about (and at) Meteor crater, Winslow, AZ. Starting with a shot of the crater from about 8-10 miles away on I=40. The terrain here is really quite flat, at an altitude of roughly 5000 ft. The crater itself is about 1mile in diameter. The low "hills" at about the center of the picture are the crater walls, formed by the ejecta impact. The exterior height seems to be between 100 and 200 feet high.
Some photos from the parking lot, the point is to show that the nearby terrain really is quite flat.
These are taken from inside the park premises. Two of the interior of the crater showing the scale (down in the center of the bottom of the crater, there is an old steam boiler used by early geologists to power their equipment. It stands roughly 6-8 feet tall. There is also a life-sized cutout figure of an astronaut in a suit, but that is not visible in these photos. Why an astronaut? Apollo mission geology training was done here.
If you look closely at the rocks, you can see all sorts of pitting/pock marks on the whitish (sandstone, I think). And the thoroughly random scattering of the rock shows some of the the power of the impact - rocks that size are heavy.
Two Ee-Nor-Moose bumblebees (almost 2 inches long) were working this flower cluster.
South of the park entrance near Cameron, AZ by a couple of miles
This shows the canyon (on Navajo reservation land) that the Little Colorado flows through. While not as spectacular, it is fairly deep.
The outcropping in this photo reminds me a bit of the "Three Sisters" in the Blue mountains in New South Wales, Australia. (Wikipedia entry
Taken while the car was moving - the blurry animal is a coyote. (A bit hokey, but not a particularly ordinary site here in Framingham, MA area)
The park service was actively setting controlled brush fires that day, very near the road. Some of the dumber motorists decided to slow to a crawl and gawk at the burning tree, which was obviously very hot. If it got much hotter, it would have a good chance of blistering the paint on the cars on the road if they stopped...
