This is so stupid. Everybody knows the visitor center is there after conducting a multi million multi year study of the most likely place for an asteroid impact. And they got it right!
Another reason to push for early detection systems. Those poor people--imagine walking outside after a nice stroll through a visitor center to find a huge impact crater only tens of meters away!
Fun fact: The Park operators get so few visitors who actually pay to see it that they genuinely get excited when someone does pay for the tour. The park is in the middle of a barren desert.
Definitely. Deserts can have incredible biodiversity. A lot of species of cactus, sedges, euphorbia, composite flowers, wrens, songbirds, the list goes on.
Barren deserts probably are so destitute and lacking in humidity that practically nothing can grow there.
The word fertile has abundance as a qualifier. I don’t know if deserts could exactly be abundant, but there is an incredible amount of biodiversity in deserts.
They put up fences several years ago so you could no longer see it from Meteor Crater Road. It's not a bad tour honestly and it's just off interstate 40 near Winslow, AZ. I'd recommend it, ONCE lol.
I used to drive between Denver and Phoenix a bunch and decided to stop in one time. They charge $29 just to see it, and put a fence around the entire crater so you can't look at the hole unless you pay them.
Well to be fair, they increased the value of the land by using a giant magnet to attract the asteroid. We wouldn't have asteroid craters if it weren't for brave entrepreneurs like this.
At this point it's a family joke. I forced my parents to stop there when i was young, i dragged my S.O. to go there on a road trip, and I will take my child see it when the time comes.
It's a huge nothing burger crater, but how often does one see a giant hole on the earth made by space!
My parents and I stopped there on a little trip from NM to Monterey, California. It was summer and I remember there being maybe 10 other visitors there. It's a super cool place but yeah it's in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Even Eustace, Muriel and their pink dog would say it's the middle of nowhere.
Almost as lucky as the presence of those huge dams, imagine the floodings if they weren't there, all that water from the lakes would destroy everything downstream
