20171022 - Crater mountain / Petrified Forest

“NO BATTLE plan ever survives first contact with the enemy” - Helmuth von Moltke, head of the19th-century Prussian army.  I can think of many enemies to motorcycle riding, but the two biggest are time and weather.  In this case, both conspired against our plan to go to Capulin National Volcano in New Mexico.  Realistically, the weather would have been chilly but tolerable.  The time constraints would have caused us to do an iron butt ride on the way back and leave us no time on Sunday for trivial matters like laundry.

So, we changed the plan and decided for a tour of Crater Mountain in Arizona and a trip through the petrified forest.  We would travel well over a thousand miles on the trip, and I'd never been to either place.  With Plan B ready, we hit the pavement.

The meteor crater is a big patch of land that once was flat and is now a huge ... crater.  A meteor hit it, and my understanding is hurricane winds resulted on impact, along with debris traveling just as fast.  Nothing would have survived in the immediate vicinity.  People dug what was left of the meteor out of the ground and put it on display in the visitors center.  Curious humans would have it no other way.  The chunk of rock, about the size of a beach ball, weighs more than a motorcycle.

The petrified forest is a land mass where several logs became encrusted with minerals after they fell and were saturated in a flood.  The results are log segments that resemble jewels.  The park is huge, and the petrified logs are all over.  As with other national parks, there is plenty of hiking there, a recreation Paul and I have never taken part in.