Trips – Page 25 – Kevin's America

Winslow, Arizona

Standin’ on a corner in Winslow Arizona….

I’ve been looking forward to this scene for a long time.

“Takin’ it Easy” was playing on a loud speaker in the street.

The Wigwam Motel is a classic Route 66 motel, complete with vintage cars. The wigwams are still available as motel rooms.

Petrified Forest National Park AZ

This National Park, just east of Holbrook AZ, is an unusual place. There is the painted desert which is very colorful landscape, ancient pueblos with petroglyphs, rock formations with more petroglyphs, and then fields of petrified wood of various colorations.

The village on the Rio Puerco (Puerco Pueblo) is a prehistoric settlement built of shaped sandstone blocks by ancestral Puebloan people. It was inhabited between 1250 and 1380 AD. At its peak the pueblo had over 100 rooms, with a possible population of 200 people. During the village’s occupation, fields of corn, beans, and squash sustained by the summer rains would have filled the river’s floodplain.

Kiva, a large room that is used for spiritual ceremonies and a place of worship.

Summer solstice marker. Prehistoric peoples used solar calendars to plan their lives around the changing season. Solstice days also marked important days for annual ceremonial cycles. The rising summer solstice Sun flows down the cleft in the boulder, creating light and shadows on the spiral petroglyph, changing daily until the light touches the center of the spiral.

Newspaper rocks, with a plethora of petroglyphs.

A petrified tree, called the Agate Bridge.

All of these log segments are petrified wood.

Meteor Crater

Winslow AZ

The approach to the museum and meteor is kind of funny…

The museum, designed by America’s architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

From 1963 through late 1970, Apollo astronauts trained at Meteor Crater because of its similarity to lunar craters. To give visitors a sense of Meteor Crater’s scale, the Museum placed a flag and an astronaut 6 foot tall cut-out on the floor of the crater. The flag is the same size as the flag placed by the first astronauts on the moon.

Meteor Crater is the best preserved and first proven large impact crater in the world.

Screenshots of a short film depicting the creation of the crater.

The Holsinger Meteorite is the largest discovered fragment of the meteor that created Meteor Crater.

The Barringer Space Museum is an education about meteors.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for the museum.

Lowell Observatory

Flagstaff AZ

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place…Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.
-Isaiah 40:26

Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff AZ is famous for discovering the planet Pluto in 1930. It has a lot of neat things to see and read.

They did a presentation on Colors of the Cosmos.

We learned that some energy levels have visible colors.

And so do elements, when presented with fire.

This is an actual meteorite from the Meteor Crater that we will visit tomorrow.

Telescope that is similar to the one that was used to discover Pluto.

The Measuring Machine, a modified microscope, was used to detect and measure the greatly shifted spectral lines of galaxies on the tiny glass photographic plate on its stage.

This prism box, with its attached fast camera, contains a single prism used to disperse the light of faint objects such as galaxies.

Percival Lowell purchased this Carl Zeiss blink comparator in 1911. While using it to search for a new planet in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto.

Percival Lowell’s mother gave him this telescope in 1870. It was his first.

This is another of Lowell’s telescopes, built in 1892. He came from Boston with this telescope to Arizona Territory in 1893, doing site testing in Tombstone, Tucson, Phoenix, Tempe, Prescott and roughly where the observatory sits today.

Lowell has an “outside” observatory, which contains several telescopes that visitors are allowed to see the sky with. This picture is of the sky when we were there. You can see the moon, and the very cloudy sky that prevented us from using the telescopes, in the pictures below.

Interesting chart. You dial in the day and time, and it shows the sky in Flagstaff for it.

This series of illustrations is a basic explanation of our Solar System and galaxy.

This is Percival Lowell’s car “Big Red”, a 1911 Stevens-Duryea Model “Y”. It is valued today at $700,000.

The six-cylinder car is still capable of highway speed of 60 MPH.

Williams, Arizona

Williams is a small town about an hour south of the Grand Canyon. For many years the town depended on business from travelers on the famous Route 66. It was the last town on Route 66 that Interstate 40 bypassed, effectively killing the economy here. Now that Route 66 is a tourist attraction, there is tourist business. Two days after we were here, it snowed 3 inches here!