On the last leg of the first part of the trip now. Visited the crater, it was very interesting. The crater crashed into earth 50 thousand years ago, Kevin thinks. They haven’t found all of the pieces or the major piece of the meteor that created the 570 foot deep, 1 mile diameter crater with a 3 mile circumference. For perspective the Washington Monument is 555 feet tall. We did get to see and touch a piece of the meteor that was recovered about the size of a large duffle bag. It is made of mostly a mixture of iron and nickel. It took about 10 minutes from when it entered the atmosphere to impact, which means it was seen from Paris, five minutes later it was seen in NYC and 3 minutes later it pounded the earth where we just stood. The appx. 150 feet across meteor lost less than 1% of its speed, crashing into earth at 11 miles a second!! (Wish we had been making that kind of time!) About half of the substance broke away on impact spreading across the desert inn small pebble to small rock size pieces the other half buried deep into the ground beneath the crater floor. For years scientists and locals had tried to bore down through in attempts to recover larger pieces. This did allow them to be able to prove it was caused by a meteor but the attempts were unsuccessful at retrieving such a large portion of the meteor. From the crater’s rim it was hard to choose between looking at the awesomeness of the crater below or the vast view we had out over the open desert.
We are near Flagstaff now and I am going to attempt to code the guestbook function so ‘ya’ll’ can leave us messages. Tonight we’ll sleep in a hotel… so excited! But first we are going to have Kevin practice his usher duties at the rehearsal and enjoy dinner with the rest of the wedding party. Until the next time.