Meteor Crater & Petrified Forest

In northern Arizona, there are two remarkable and unusual places.  One is a spot where a meteor crashed and the other is a "petrified forest."  I put that in quotations because it's not a forest at all.  It looks like this:

I couldn't see the forest for the trees.  Oh wait...

Instead, what it is is a large swatch of desert that hundreds of millions of years ago was home to a forest.  We're talking pre-dinosaur times.  Over time, some of the trees sank into a lake that grew to cover the area and got buried under the earth.  Instead of decomposing, they turned into stones and then millions of years later, the trees got pushed up onto the desert when the land rose underneath them.  So now the desert is littered with these "logs":

A lot of the prettiest petrified wood-- which became quartz, I think-- was removed long ago, before the area was a National Park.*  But even the less dazzling pieces are still pretty cool.  Other parts of the Park are also really cool, with colorful stratified hills and open vistas.

That bluish tint is in the rock, not a trick of the lighting.

The other unusual feature of the land I saw in northern Arizona is the Meteor Crater, where about 50,000 years ago, a meteor hit the planet, gouging a deep hole and sending up a ton of junk (although no where near as much as the meteor that caused the dust cloud that probably killed the dinosaurs).

The only structure on the rim of the crater, from the 1930s.

This isn't the only meteor crater on earth, but scientists think it's the best-preserved one.  There hasn't been a lot of weather to fill in the hole or blow away the dirt that got blown out of it.  And it was definitely caused by a meteor, as shown by traces of metals found in the area that are only associated with objects that crash into the Earth.

This is not my photo; it's one of many aerial photos found on the web.

Pretty cool day, and the weather was perfect to be outside exploring and taking photos.

*  If you're interested, I've found a couple articles explaining the difference between a National Park and a National Forest and between a National Park and a National Monument.  If you're not interested in the articles, the short version is that a National Park's goal is to preserve nature, while a National Forest has the joint goal of preservation and land usage (like logging, water usage, etc.).  National Park designation takes an act of Congress, while a Presidential Order can create a National Monument.  The latter is usually used to preserve either historical structures or natural features of scientific interest.