The media is full of commemorative stories
and information this morning as it’s the 15th anniversary of the
attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon.
We could have spent another day in Gallup,
but we need to keep to our schedule. We
left about 10am after a bit of a sleep in, and headed west on the I-40 to
Winslow, Arizona. Crossed over at about
10.30 which meant our clocks went back an hour, so it was now 9.30am and we gained an hour. Nice easy drive, plenty of trucks and
traffic.
Stopped in at Winslow, Arizona.
Standin' on the Corner Park (opened 1999 in Winslow, Arizona) is a public park, commemorating the song "Take It Easy", written by Jackson Browne and the late Glenn Frey, and most famously recorded by the Eagles. The song includes the verse "Well, I'm a standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona and such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford slowin' down to take a look at me". The park contains a two-story trompe-l'œil mural by John Pugh, and a life-size bronze statue of a "life sized man with a guitar from the "Eagles" song "Take it Easy" by Ron Adamson standing on a corner with a guitar. The park is surrounded by a wall of bricks, each with a donor's name on it, and a story by each of the donors describing their fondness for Winslow.
Up until the 1960s, Winslow was a thriving town in northern Arizona just off Route 66. Construction of the $7.7 million bypass around Winslow began soon after 1977. When I-40 bypassed the community many local businesses disappeared, tourism being among the hardest hit. While some local jobs remained (as Winslow is the base of operation for a thousand railroad workers), the local downtown was badly hurt by the influx of national chains (such as Walmart and McDonalds) along the new Interstate Highway to the north of the town. Twenty years passed and Winslow was stuck in a commercial rut.
We kept driving and found the 'Meteor Crater'!
About 50,000 years ago, a rock fragment broke away from the asteroid belt and hurtled towards earth. The rock, composed of nickel and iron, was about 50 meters across and weighed 300,000 tons. It was travelling at 12.8 kilometers per second. Upon entering the earth’s atmosphere it became a giant fireball that streaked across the North American sky. When it crashed into the plains of Arizona, it exploded with a force equal to 10 megatons or about 150 times the force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The violence of the impact vaporized the meteorite leaving little residue, but millions of tons of limestone and sandstone were blasted out covering the ground for a mile in every direction. When the dust settled, what remained was a crater over a kilometer across and 750 feet deep. The impact occurred during the last ice age, a time when the Arizona landscape was cooler and wetter. The area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by woolly mammoths and giant ground sloths. The force of the impact leveled the forest for miles around, hurling the mammoths across the plain and killing or severely injuring any animals unfortunate enough to be nearby.
We paid $US18 admission fee. Watched a 10 minute video explaining the crater in the theatre. Next we were offered a 1.5hr walking tour around a part of the rim to look up close at the geology and hear about the history of the crater. Enjoyed this!
Returned and looked through the museum.
Below is a 630kg piece of the meteorite which was thrown on impact and found in the field by a researcher in the early 1900's. He found it in the field and had to get several men to help him lift it and take it to safety. Thinking it was iron ore, they hoped to find more and sell it. But this didn't occur because most of the meteorite destructed on impact.
Standin' on the Corner Park (opened 1999 in Winslow, Arizona) is a public park, commemorating the song "Take It Easy", written by Jackson Browne and the late Glenn Frey, and most famously recorded by the Eagles. The song includes the verse "Well, I'm a standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona and such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford slowin' down to take a look at me". The park contains a two-story trompe-l'œil mural by John Pugh, and a life-size bronze statue of a "life sized man with a guitar from the "Eagles" song "Take it Easy" by Ron Adamson standing on a corner with a guitar. The park is surrounded by a wall of bricks, each with a donor's name on it, and a story by each of the donors describing their fondness for Winslow.
Up until the 1960s, Winslow was a thriving town in northern Arizona just off Route 66. Construction of the $7.7 million bypass around Winslow began soon after 1977. When I-40 bypassed the community many local businesses disappeared, tourism being among the hardest hit. While some local jobs remained (as Winslow is the base of operation for a thousand railroad workers), the local downtown was badly hurt by the influx of national chains (such as Walmart and McDonalds) along the new Interstate Highway to the north of the town. Twenty years passed and Winslow was stuck in a commercial rut.
We kept driving and found the 'Meteor Crater'!
About 50,000 years ago, a rock fragment broke away from the asteroid belt and hurtled towards earth. The rock, composed of nickel and iron, was about 50 meters across and weighed 300,000 tons. It was travelling at 12.8 kilometers per second. Upon entering the earth’s atmosphere it became a giant fireball that streaked across the North American sky. When it crashed into the plains of Arizona, it exploded with a force equal to 10 megatons or about 150 times the force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The violence of the impact vaporized the meteorite leaving little residue, but millions of tons of limestone and sandstone were blasted out covering the ground for a mile in every direction. When the dust settled, what remained was a crater over a kilometer across and 750 feet deep. The impact occurred during the last ice age, a time when the Arizona landscape was cooler and wetter. The area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by woolly mammoths and giant ground sloths. The force of the impact leveled the forest for miles around, hurling the mammoths across the plain and killing or severely injuring any animals unfortunate enough to be nearby.
We paid $US18 admission fee. Watched a 10 minute video explaining the crater in the theatre. Next we were offered a 1.5hr walking tour around a part of the rim to look up close at the geology and hear about the history of the crater. Enjoyed this!
Returned and looked through the museum.
Below is a 630kg piece of the meteorite which was thrown on impact and found in the field by a researcher in the early 1900's. He found it in the field and had to get several men to help him lift it and take it to safety. Thinking it was iron ore, they hoped to find more and sell it. But this didn't occur because most of the meteorite destructed on impact.
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