Dinosaurs beware!

A few months ago Garry and I were watching a TV documentary that featured Meteor Crater, located on the dry, open plains of northern Arizona. It was created about 50,000 years ago by the impact of a 50-metre wide nickel-iron meteor.  In seconds the impact created a hole 1,200 metres in diameter, 170 metres deep, enclosed by a jagged rim that rises 45 metres above the surrounding area. 

While meteor craters are a common sight throughout the solar system, on Earth they're relatively rare.  Unlike other planets, or even our moon, on Earth natural erosion by wind and water slowly erases the presence meteor craters.  As a result, Meteor Crater is rather unique.

On a whim I googled this landmark's exact location and discovered it was less than an hour's drive from the Painted Desert. We'd already made plans to visit the desert as part of our Southwest Road Trip, before stopping overnight in a nearby town. Regular readers will know I'm total space nut and so our travel plans were quickly modified to incorporate a visit to Meteor Crater.  This included changing our hotel to one located in Winslow, Arizona.

This change of plan proved rather fortuitous. We later learnt that the classic trans-continential highway Route 66 passed through Winslow. In its heyday, the 3940 km long highway linked Chicago and Santa Monica in Los Angeles. Over the years, all manner of popular culture has celebrated it including a hit single by the Eagles.  Their single, "Takin' it Easy", includes the lyrics, "...And take it easy. Well, I’m a standing on a corner, in Winslow, Arizona..."  

The town has subsequently immortalised the song, building a small park in the centre of town. Here you can take your photo with a bronze statue of a guitar-carrying '70s rambling man, who looks across an intersection dominated by a giant Route 66 logo. Take a closer look at the photo of Garry above. The building in the background is mural. There’s literally nothing there other than a solid brick wall.

Winslow's place in American folklore actually extends back more than century.  Until the 1960s, it was the largest town in northern Arizona. It was built in the 1880s by the Santa Fe Railway Company and soon became a major stop. Today, the train still stops in town, right outside La Posada, a magnificent 1930 hacienda-style inn. The inn was once marked for demolition but was saved and restored a decade ago. The final result is impressive.

We had dinner in its vast dining hall. We were lucky enough to see the last remaining daily passenger train service pull up outside as we dined. It stopped for less than five minutes. Afterwards we ventured across the hotel lawn to check out the track. The station platform is basically a functional, paved stretch of stony desert, and guests are kept from harm’s way by little more than a knee-high brick wall. The image above was pulled from the hotel’s website.

The following morning dawned bright and clear.  Perfect conditions for exploring Meteor Crater.  Incredibly, the entire site is privately-owned. The land was sold in 1903 ago to Daniel Barringer, a mining entrepreneur who was planned to mine the meteor's iron and nickel deposits. Sadly, most of the meteor had vapourised on impact, leaving only a few fragments buried deep beneath the crater floor thus making its recovery totally uneconomic.  His mining venture ultimately failed.  However, his descendents have since transformed the site into a popular tourist venture that includes an impressive museum and guided rim walk.

As we wandered past fractured and pulverised rock, it was easy to see why NASA once trained moon-walking astronauts here on the geological features of an impact crater. Today, in a nod to Meteor Crater's contribution to the Apollo space program, the museum has installed a life-size cut-out of an astronaut on the base of the crater.  This gives you an impressive sense of the crater's size, as it took me almost an hour to locate the cut-out on the crater floor.  Only then could I truly appreciate just how big this hole is.  

In fact, Meteor Crater was so wide I couldn't fit the entire scene into a single photo.  However, all is not lost.  I found a free app called Autostitch online that lets me merge three separate images into the funky panorama shot you can see above (click on the image to see it in its original size). As Garry sagely noted, the crater really is little more than a spectacular hole in the ground.

[April 2026: I've used AI and Photoshop to update the panorama image. It's the second image above]

Still, it was fascinating to stand on its rim looking in one direction across the scarred interior, before turning to take in the vast, open plain upon which it is located.  Such a stark contrast makes the staggering power and destruction of a large meteor all too real. Those poor dinosaurs. They really had no chance at all when a similar impact struck the Earth millions of years ago.