Visited Meteor Crater

On the way to Santa Fe, we visited Meteor Crater, a gigantic meteor imapct crater in the Arizona desert. It is 500 feet deep and nearly three-quarters of a mile wide: It's kind of impossible to communicate how big the crater is with photographs, because it's also kind of hard to see how big it is in person. The crater lacks many good visual indicators for scale, so it almost looks smaller than it really is. It wasn't until our tour guide began pointing out small pieces of debris in the basin of the aircraft - abandoned mines, the wing of a crashed airplane, etc - that I realized how large the crater actually is. The crater is privately owned by a group of families. Some of these families are the descendants of the people who purchased the land around the crater for cattle ranching, while the last family consists of people descended from the mining engineer who first tried searching for a meteor inside the crater. He apparently spent decades, and half a million dollars in back-then…