Walnut Canyon, Meteor Crater & Petrified Forest

On our drive from Grand Canyon down to Heber, Arizona, we stopped at three big attractions: Walnut Canyon National Park, Meteor Crater, and Petrified Forest National Park. Neither of us had ever heard of Walnut Canyon, but that is the current name of the place where a Hopi tribe lived in cliffside homes. They built masonry walls to divide rooms in the side of the canyon wall. The public path goes down a couple hundred modern stairs to one section of the old apartments. We had both always wanted to see cliffside dwellings, and these were pretty interesting, although there was a video of other cliffside dwellings in the American southwest, and it looked like Montezuma's Castle was the most spectacular.

From there we drove down and stopped at Meteor Crater. As we approached we listened to their canned loop of audio on an AM station, which never once mentioned the essential fact that it is not a national park, and costs an outrageous fifteen dollars. Look, it's a cool crater, it's a big hole in the ground, and if it is privately owned I would pay a reasonable price to look into the hole. That price would be two dollars a head. Instead, they have this needless "museum" with cool science and history lessons for third graders, and a grimy Subway sandwich shop. I do not recommend this stop, but I would for two dollars. Instead, go where Ashleigh and I went in 2005, to a big crater in the middle of the Nevada desert, where almost nobody goes, and it's free. Big holes in the ground are pretty much all the same.

Then we were running out of time, but we drove past Holbrook and did a loop of road out to Petrified Forest, through the National Park, and back to Holbrook. That was an interesting drive, but we missed our opportunity to see the best sites because we entered at the south entrance, and didn't read the literature fully until we were on the road and past all the good stuff which is near that entrance. By the way, long ago there was a forest there, but the trees all fell down and some were washed into bogs, covered in dense mud and clay which cut off the oxygen driving decomposition; then much later, silica seeped through the clay and replaced the rotted wood. When the mud finally eroded away so much later, there were silica casts of the logs left behind. Impurities with the silica often impart mild or vivid coloration.

After that we were late getting to the campground to see dad and Kathleen and their friends Roger and Judy, so we drove down past Heber to a dirt road going into Sitgreaves National Forest. We found the campsite, said hello, set up the trailer, and settled in for a campfire.