Meteor Crater aka: Barringer Meteor Crater

I was driving school bus for the Flagstaff School District 1997-99. One of the perks is driving the kids to places I wasn’t able to go to when I was their ages. I remember Meteor Crater the most.

The view is breathtaking, not only because of the vast landscape but you realize there’s more to this universe than just this planet.

Something to keep in mind… even though you’re only a few hundred feet above the surrounding desert floor, you’re still over 6k feet above sea level. The air starts getting a little thin up there.

If you’ve got really good eyes (or a telephoto lens), you can see a cutout of an astronaut way down in the crater, near the mining equipment. I didn’t notice it until I got home and looked at my pictures.

Don’t forget to take a look at the wall they have showing all the manned flights into space, and a small memorial for those astronauts who have been killed as part of the space program.

Oh, and they don’t let you hike down into the crater anymore. You can tour along the ridgeline, but you can’t go down to the bottom like my dad tells me he has done.

expensive and kind of lame, it was worth the visit, but i expected more, it was almost like you couldnt get close enough to appreciate the immensity

Expensive when all you get is a view of a hole in the ground – kind of a let-down.

Numerous movies have been filmed at Meteor Crater, including Starman. It was also used for training before lunar missions.

While the Grand Canyon is breathtaking, so is Meteor Crater, just in an entirely different way. It’s massive, and to think of what would happen if another meteor that size crashed into the planet…