On Thursday morning, we headed to Sunset Crater. Sunset Crater was created by volcanic activity. Flagstaff area is filled with volcanoes. The cinder cone began to form when rock sprayed from a crack in the earth, high into the air, then fell to the Earth as cinders and large rocks sometime between 1040 and 1100. The area is filled with volcanic rock. It's really quite beautiful.
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| We took the lava flow trail to see all the volcanic rock. It was beautiful and really quite amazing. |
Then we headed up the road about 15 or 20 miles to Wupatki National Monument. Right behind the visitor center is a .5 mile loop trail where you can see the Wupatki pueblo. The people of this area are termed the Sinagua...a title that refers to their ability to survive in an area with so little water. The ruins show that this area was a crossroads for the Sinagua, Kayenta Anasazi and Cohonina peoples...with homes built in the Anasazi style but with Sinagua pottery and tools. Some archaelogists believe that many different cultures interacted here; others believed they were just different groups or different ways to live as a Sinagua. The people were warned by tremors that the Sunset Crater volcano would erupt. They left before the eruption.
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| Wupatki pueblo...isn't that incredible?! |
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| Ella and Gabby didn't really want to walk much and were being cranky about seeing the ruins so Michelle posed in many of the photos. |
We saw the Box Canyon dwellings and the Citadel Pueblo and Nalakihu Pueblo.
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Their stonework is quite impressive to me!
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After we finished at Wupatki, it was lunch time. We went to Salsa Brava, a Mexican restaurant in Flagstaff that my secretary (Dani) and another teacher (Laura) recommended. It was tasty. We took a cute photo outside the restaurant, but unless Michelle has a copy of it, it's gone.
Then the girls wanted to head to Meteor Crater to see it. It was pretty pricy, but also pretty amazing how big it is.
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Way down on the ground, in the center, there is equipment. There are binoculars and you can look through them and see a 6 foot cardboard cut out of a man near the equipment. But from on top, he isn't even visible. The crater is seriously huge. But what impressed and surprised me the most was that there was a map of the moon and they circled a crater on the moon that was approximately the same size and it looked like this tiny dot...so the craters on the moon are ginormous!!
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| Like I said, you can't see it...but down there is the 6 foot cut out of a man. |
I liked the museum which had interactive exhibits and a lot of infomation. I took quite a few photos...all of which I lost when I lost my phone. :(
Then we headed back to the hotel and swam some more! And had a relatively early night because we were all tired.
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