Driving east along the I-40 early this misty morning I saw just the tips of the San Francisco mountains (highest point in Arizona), and other mesas and buttes seemingly hovering above the mist - magical! Spent most of the morning at Meteor Crater, a mile-wide crater caused by a meteorite only 150 ft in diameter, about 50,000 years ago. There's a 'fragment' of the original meteorite which is maybe 2 ft long by 15 in wide - it weighs about a ton! Other fragments are in New York Natural History Museum and the Chicago Field Museum (can't find a reference online, sorry!) if anyone wants to go and see them!----------
I got my exercise today with a guided walk around the perimeter (actually only about a mile out and back, you can't go all the way round). Our guide, Eduardo Rubio, was highly entertaining; he used to be a writer and translator, but retired early and moved out to the desert. He lives in an apartment at the site and seems just as happy as can be, sharing his knowledge and tremendous enthusiasm for the crater and the Colorado Plateau, with great humour. A number of movies have been made here, including Star Man, starring Jeff Bridges - I wondered if this was the crater used for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but apparently not!
I got my exercise today with a guided walk around the perimeter (actually only about a mile out and back, you can't go all the way round). Our guide, Eduardo Rubio, was highly entertaining; he used to be a writer and translator, but retired early and moved out to the desert. He lives in an apartment at the site and seems just as happy as can be, sharing his knowledge and tremendous enthusiasm for the crater and the Colorado Plateau, with great humour. A number of movies have been made here, including Star Man, starring Jeff Bridges - I wondered if this was the crater used for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but apparently not!
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Saw my first road runner, just as I turned north on US-191 - they really do run like the one in the cartoon! US-191 twists and turns following the contours of the canyons through the Navajo Nation. At one point I realised that the road was running along the western edge of the canyon and it was about 1,000 ft down to the canyon floor ... and then there was a blind summit with a high canyon wall ahead, so for a heart-stopping moment it seemed as though the road would just run into the wall ... but a sharp right turn and a sudden 10% decline solved the problem!
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There are many little towns full of trailer parks, small cabins, and trading posts selling rugs, pottery and jewellery, all the way across the Reservation, surrounded by the most wonderful scenery; red, grey and white canyons for 200 miles, red rocky outcrops on canyon floors (this is at Round Rock), and the most amazing sunset - I was just turning on to US-160 East, and to the north I could see the snow-topped mountains of Colorado turned pink by the setting sun against a misty blue and purple sky. But it was getting too dark by this time for photos - I should have been half-an-hour earlier.----------
Past the sign for Four Corners, and over the border into New Mexico - the rocks change from red to grey-green (or maybe it was just a trick of the light, I'll check it out tomorrow), through Shiprock, and on to the Motel 6 in Farmington.
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