Meteor Crater Off I-40 in the Arizona Desert

Driving through the Arizona desert, one sign caught our eye; Meteor Crater (I 40 exit 233 35 miles east of Flagstaff). According to the literature we got when we walked inside, 50,000 years ago a meteor hit the spot we were standing on at the gracefully cautious speed of 26,000 miles an hour and this spot was instantly and forever transformed from the barren plain it was to the crater it remains today. At 150 feet across and weighing several hundred thousand tons the force of this blast was likened to 20 million tons of TNT. While I’m sure none of us here in the living world have any idea what 20 million tons of TNT feels like, we can undoubtedly imagine the magnitude of its force.

While the $15.00 price tag per made me balk at first, once inside I felt as though a child again. The exhibits were completely outside the sphere of my adult minds understanding and everything that this place represented to me was so cool! I was totally taken with the exhibit, the displays, the videos, and with the crater itself that I’d strongly suggest anyone who is traveling through this area to check it out.

One of the biggest mistakes we made was the time of day we were traveling through the Meteor Crater area. While Arizona doesn’t recognize daylight savings time and it was really an hour earlier than we had thought, one of the things that any visitor should take into account is that they have daily tours earlier during the day and are no doubt much more informative. While the exhibit itself was very powerful and while the trip is worth it regardless, you should remember that if you are hoping for some kind of guidance through the maze of this epic crater, you should make a day of it.

In fact this thing was so huge we saw it from a number of different vantage points and there are many different levels and walkways you can witness the crater from. At over 700 feet deep and 4000 feet across this crater is truly an enormous site to behold. To give it some perspective the circumference of the whole thing is 2.4 miles; one impact and 2.4 miles!

All in all we are all a part of this epic swooping wilderness that is the cosmos so it’s tough to say either way about what Meteor Crater would mean in the grand scheme of things. However, to this Earth bound, biped the Meteor Crater meteor was truly an epic sight to see and one which I can certainly recommend to other humanoids.