Meteor Crater on the horizon
Every geological surface feature needs a convenient sign to point it out. It doesn't urt to have nearby restrooms, Subway, and rock shop.
NO TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT: It's okay, we're geologists. We're with the 'rock band,' if you will.
Shawn explains about the crater
Shawn points out the crater
Ejecta
A bit of the Moenkope poking out of the crater wall
Shawn indicates some IR-bright features of the ejecta blanket
A passing stagecoach. I mean semi.
Some jumbled-up Kaibab limestone blocks on the rim of the crater
Crater rim, San Francisco peaks
Large ejecta blocks
House Rock, a big block of Kaibab thrown clear of the crater.
What a desolate place this is
Check out that fault. (And San Fran again)
Gullies in the slumped crater wall
Passing through a hole in a fence
Dead trees. Scrub. Crater. Fault.
The group, looking particularly like explorers
Look how the trees cluster on one side of the crater rim
Ejecta: Kaibab blocks in pulverized Coconino sandstone
Jim chastised me for not taking a proper geologist's photo there, and tossed in his scale bar. It's a pretty cool block of Kaibab, it deserves the attention.
...off into the wilderness!
Here, we found the beach. Thanks, impact cratering, for pulverizing the sandstone so finely!
A dramatic Moenkope outcrop, marking the overturned flap of the ejecta blanket
Shawn demonstrates how the ejecta blanket folds over, in front of a mining cut that exposed the entire overturned flap
Some Moenkope, right about where it got folded over by the impact.
Some of Barringer's old mining apparatus--here, he was going for “rockflour,” which is quartz sandstone that got shock-metamorphosed in such a way that the grains were pulverized in place. The rockflour is incredibly fine, but preserves Coconino features like crossbeds.
More of Barringer's mine buildings, and rockflour in the foreground.
Mine buildings
Karrie in front of the Old West structure
Tarnation! The mine blew up.
Note the dip of the Kaibab beds - just in case you didn't believe this was a crater.
The mine in the bottom of the crater
Gecko!!
Barringer's old museum - more great old buildings! And this one had great ripples in the sandstone blocks, too.
I love ruins
Briony explores the ruins.
Maybe that was a nice bathtub once upon a time.
THERE ARE ANCIENT BEACHES ON THE WALLS
Howdy there.
Walnut Canyon overlook
The dry river of Walnut Canyon
Cliff dwellings! What an awesome place to live.
CROSSBEDS!
MORE CROSSBEDS
Cliff houses!
Some fallen blocks are pretty evident here - erosion at work.
Several different episodes of crossbedding
Cliff houses behind some trees
Amanda lounging in a cliff house doorway
A terribly lit picture of Laura inspecting the soot stains in a cliff house
Investigating the crossbeds
An intact cliff house facade. (Remember how Amanda took up that whole wall?)
Ryan explains dip angles of crossbeds
Best picture I took of the San Francisco Peaks all trip - on the walk in to Red Mountain
On the Red Mountain trail
Here's Red Mountain in the sunset
You can just make out the eroded cinder cone interior in this shot
Red Mountain interior. Weird erosion already obvious.
Snow, trees, and skree.
Laura charges up the skree
Karrie follows
...and then Chris and Andrew
Laura looks slightly heroic.
Jim's coming up the skree slope to join us. Dan and Mike are getting a running start behind him....
CHARRRRGE!!!
I'm struggling with lighting and exposure settings
HOODOOS
Dan, silhouetted.
Perched on a hoodoo
We could hear this snow melting and trickling down the hoodoos
Laura heads up into the hoodoos.
Flash effects
This scarmble illustrates how we really couldn't tell apart the loose skree from welded rock
Andrew skree-skiing
Meteor crater mosaic
Laura at Meteor Crater
Mosaic of the entire overturned flap of the ejecta blanket. You can see where the original layer of Moenkope transitions to the folded-over layer where the texture of the rock changes to thin sheets, overlaid by jumbled Kaibab. Of course, the whole thing has been eroded back from the crater.
The rock flour mine
Derelict mine buildings
Exposed bedrock, faults, gullies, and the Visitors' Center.
Looking through the old ruined museum at Meteor Crater in the distance
Walnut Canyon river bend mosaic
Walnut Canyon mosaic
Crossbed mosaic
San Francisco Peaks mosaic
