Ages ago, before humans lived in North America, a space rock pierced the atmosphere and screamed in a blaze of light toward the surface of the Earth.
Oh, the catastrophe it must have been when the meteor hit the ground near modern-day Winslow, Ariz. The hole it left behind was a mile wide.
Fifty thousand years later, I walked right into it.
“We believe there was a 150-foot meteorite that came in at about 26,000 miles per hour,” said Tyler Johnson, my tour guide on a hike to the bottom on a recent June morning. “We had essentially a nuclear explosion here.”
Meteor Crater is one of the best-preserved impact craters on the planet. For years, visitors have wanted access to the bottom. Now for the first time ever, the narrow trail that leads to the bottom of Meteor Crater is open for guided tours.
This part of Northern Arizona, between Flagstaff and Winslow, just off Interstate 40, is windswept and mostly barren. But 50,000 years ago, it looked very different. Mammoths and giant ground sloths roamed the juniper-pinon forest. The shockwave from the impact would have wiped out anything living for miles in all directions.
But Johnson said the meteorite that made this hole is a “baby in comparison” to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years earlier. That one was “miles in diameter, versus 150 feet.”
Today Meteor Crater is 570 feet deep and the trail to the bottom is steep. It’s known as the Astronaut Trail because during the Apollo mission, NASA astronauts traveled this path.
Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong came here to prepare for their trip to the moon.
“Imagine doing this in full head-to-toe astronaut gear,” Johnson told a small group of hikers as we trudged deeper into the crater. “They used this as a training spot for the astronauts because it was the most realistic to a crater on the moon.”
The training was worth it. Johnson said, at one point, an astronaut tore their space suit, and improvements were made before launching to the moon.
Farther down the trail, more historical artifacts appear. Wreckage from a 1960s plane crash is still visible near the crater wall, the tail number fading after decades in the sun. So is a tangle of old pipes that once carried water to miners on the crater floor. Rusted out tanks and mine shafts are also clearly visible on the bottom.
In the early 1900s, an engineer named Daniel Barringer believed he could make a fortune mining the heavy metals from a meteorite that was made mostly of iron and nickel. Barringer was convinced it was still buried below the impact crater. His plans didn’t work out.
What Barringer didn’t realize is that when the rock struck the ground, “it hit like an atomic bomb, and over 80% was vaporized or recondensed into other materials,” Johnson said.
But the family still owns the land where the meteorite struck and has encouraged scientific research at the site for decades. There’s also a museum at the crater’s rim that is a popular destination for tourists.
Hiker Jonathan Misurda made the trip from Tucson. He said walking to the bottom reminds him of the cratered landscape he can see on the moon through a telescope.
“It’s the closest I’ll ever get to that,” Misurda said, with the walls of Meteor Crater rising up around him. “It’s a great experience, and very awing.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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