Monday, January 09, 2006

After a bit of a sleep in, we left at about 10:30am or so to go explore some of the local sites. Our drive from the airport could have included the scenic route on 89A, but we opted for Route 17 instead since it was highway and 89A wound its way through Oak Creek Canyon. We didn’t want to risk running off a cliff in the dark and in our tired state the night before. So we headed out of Sedona north on 89A and found ourselves passing through in a lovely canyon. (Pictures here and here.)

As you can see in the pictures, it was a clear, sunny day. The weather all week was perfect - slightly chilly, windy, clear blue skies, and very sunny. It made for some tough picture taking, but we managed to get some good shots as you see in later posts.

From 89A, we got onto I-40E headed out to Meteor Crater. That is one large hole in the ground. See here and here. The second picture was tough to take because it was so windy at the topmost observation point. Just after I took that picture one of the guides came up to tell us to come back down because they clocked a wind gust of 66mph and it wasn’t safe. We had noticed the hurricane force winds! If you look in the right center of the crater, you’ll see white stuff. One of the items down there to give you perspective of the size of the crater is a fake astronaut that is 6 feet tall. Even with the telescope they had available to look through he was hard to find because he was so tiny. One last picture I tried to get was the beautiful vista from a large “picture window” - unfortunately it doesn’t convey just how beautiful the horizon landscape really is.

From there we got back onto Route 89N toward Sunset Crater Volcano. At that point in the afternoon the clouds were rolling in and the temperature dropped so we didn’t linger too long. Just one picture here. We did wander through the lava field a bit and that picture is of me in front of the volcano itself - you can see the black basalt on the right face. The left face is the red color that gives it the sunset coloring that inspired its name.