On Sunday morning we left Holbrook, which is not a place one should be sad to leave. Once a rough frontier town – it doesn’t have much more to offer in 2008. Fortunately only a short drive away is the Petrified Forest National Park. Jack and Emily love rocks, minerals and fossils, so to go and look at petrified wood is heaven to them. Our first stop is the visitor centre, where we get treated to a Ranger talk on the formation of the petrified forest in the late Triassic period, 225 million years ago.
This is great introduction and we follow this by taking the short trail outside we actually get to see the final great act of petrification. Here are the fallen trees of the primordial forest, most likely carried to these spots by a rampageous river. The minerals from the river would have been absorbed by the wood of the trees and overtime what was wood has been mineralised to leave a permanent record on the landscape. The effect of mineralisation has created a wonderful kaleidoscope of colours in the petrified wood. There are huge petrified trunks of trees lying all around the trail. Truly wonderful!The National Park itself is vast – taking nearly an hour of solid driving from the south entrance to the north entrance. En route we make a couple of stops to look at some Pueblo ruins and petroglyphs painted on the rocks. At the North entrance of the park we take the Painted Desert loop, taking us past grand vistas of the colourful desert. Unfortunately the weather is not co-operating and it is also not the best time of day to see the colours ; early morning and late afternoon sun brings out the colours most effectively. We don’t have the time to wait so will have to rely on our imagination to picture this splendid scene – it is time to move on to our next stop.
Our plan is to reach Sedona, Arizona on this day. We set off across the flat and tedious high desert plains. One of the issues with flat plains is that they don’t provide any protection from the wind, which is particularly tiresome (and dangerous) in a relatively light weight, high sided vehicle – oh yes, like a motor home. Well, as chance would have it, a strong afternoon gusty wind kicks up across the desert – throwing up a bit of a dust storm. Of more concern is the impact of strong wind gusts side on to our vehicle as we drive down the road. Also ,because of the direction the wind is blowing it is causing the awning (which is furled up) to lift and bash against the side of the motor home – loudly. Not usually of weak disposition in terms of driving conditions, Mark is struggling to hold a steady course on the road. Well we decide to pull off at the signs for Meteor Crater National Monument where there are services – as we approach these we pass over a cattle grid which causes the remote brakes to go on in our tow-behind Jeep. The message we feel from God is to cut our losses and stop. As luck would have it there is RV park right next to the service station – so with little hesitation we pull in for the night and hook up.
It had been our intention to stop and look at the meteor crater anyway, so providence had a hand in bringing us to this point. Although it was getting late in the day we still had about an hour to explore the crater so we drove up the visitor centre. The approach to the crater passes through the flat desert, with the crater walls rising 150 feet above the plain it is easily seen from miles away. The crater was created about 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch when a nickel-iron meteor about 150 feet across collided with the earth at about 30,000 miles per hour. The impact was devastating, producing a massive explosion equivalent to at least 2.5 megatons of TNT comparable to a large thermonuclear explosion and about 150 times the yield of the atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki. The explosion dug out 175 million tons of rock leaving a crater that is 4000 feet in diameter and 570 feet deep. The wind that caused us to stop here has also prevented walking tours along the rim but we are able to go out on to the viewing decks and admire this large dent in the earth’s surface. Difficult to imagine what it would have been like to been here during the collision – probably deadly. There is a good visitors centre here and we find out more about the crater’s history and the nature of the Earth at the time from watching a short video and listening to the staff talk around a large chunk of nickel-iron found in a wash some distance from the crater. Unfortunately it is late in the day and we don’t have time to look around the museum exhibits, choosing the gift shop (as always) instead.
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