Arizona’s Meteor Crater: A big bang for your buck

IF it were due to happen on a specific date -- say, on a moonless Friday night, when the Arizona sky is frosted with stars -- the popular interest might be staggering. People and TV trucks might line the roads at a safe distance, looking for the best vantage points. All would point binoculars or cameras to witness one of the great celestial spectacles in history.

As it is, the space rock that landed in the barren desert near Winslow, Ariz., fell 50,000 years ago.

A stop between ... Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest national parks. It’s only six miles south of Interstate 40, about 30 minutes’ drive east of Flagstaff.

The draw: Meteor Crater, a pit as round as any moon crater, is more than 4,000 feet across and deep enough to swallow a 60-story building.

There’s a tiny museum with a gift shop but no resort hotels, no adjoining casinos and not a single theme restaurant. The crater is pretty much all there is, and yet an estimated 230,000 people still come to see it each year. Apollo astronauts trained inside it in the 1960s because of its similarity to lunar craters.

Visitors stare at the crater’s steep, pale-mustard walls, look to the sky and try to grasp what it must have been like when worlds collided. Scientists estimate that the object that landed here was only 150 feet in diameter but struck with the force of 20 million tons of TNT. It would have roared from the sky at a mind-boggling 40,000 mph.

“This is impressive,” said Bob McNabb of Portland, Ore., who was gazing at the crater from the uppermost of three observation decks along the northern rim. “Some people said, ‘Yeah, it’s just a big hole in the ground’ -- but we’re glad we came.”

The site is still owned by the descendants of Daniel Barringer, who began exploring the crater in 1903 and staked the original claim, hoping to mine the meteorite itself. The rock must have disintegrated, however, because no significant piece of it has ever been recovered.

The lesson of Meteor Crater is that Earth is in constant danger. As a museum display points out, a huge explosion in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, knocked down trees across about 800 square miles. “A very large meteorite could be disastrous,” a placard warns, “creating a huge initial blast, followed by tsunamis, wildfires, prolonged darkness and atmospheric effects.”

A smaller Meteor Crater-size impact may happen every 50,000 years. Which means, perhaps, we’re due for another.

The delay: It’s a 10- or 15-minute detour off Interstate 40 to the crater. Allow 60 to 90 minutes to see the museum, walk along the rim and check out the view from the observation decks. Guided tours of the rim leave hourly between 9:15 a.m. and 2:15 p.m. daily.

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Meteor Crater, Exit 233 off Interstate 40. Open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. the rest of the year. $15, $13 seniors; $6 ages 6-17, 5 and younger free. (928) 289-5898, www.meteorcrater.com.