Apache National Forest, AZ–Meteor Crater, AZ

The roads in Arizona suck. The roads in New Mexico were quite nice; apparently NM has lots of highway money it doesn’t know what to do with, because they stick signs up everywhere. Every time you pass over a culvert, there are dozens of black and yellow striped signs warning you that, if you need to veer off the road, don’t do it right now. Every time the center line changes from broken to solid, a sign on the side of the road will warn you, “NO PASSING ZONE” or “PASS WITH CARE.” I suppose that might be useful if the road were snow-covered, but this is New Mexico we’re talking about. Berck says, “I find these signs almost insulting.”

But the roads in Arizona are pretty bad. Makes typing tricky at times, reading back over what I wrote unpleasant, especially since we’re cruising at 90.

We stopped for the night at a little green tent on the side of the road in a National Forest(according to the map). It was actually a couple mile drive, the last half mile of which was mud or snow. We finally got to the campground, eerily deserted. There was no place to pay for camping, a bunch of the signs were missing. One sign that still stood said, “Check in with host! –>”

The only thing in the direction of the “host” was a snowy path leading to some wood cabins. So after we picked our site, we headed down the path. There were actually dozens of cabins, but they were all abandoned. Inside each was a couple of mattresses, bed frames, refrigerator, tiny stove, and sink. All the windows were missing, and most of the doors had been broken in. Saplings grew up around them. It looked as if it had been a motel made up of individual cabins that been left to rot. The complex was getting some good use, though … brightly colored little balls were strewn everywhere in the snow. It had become the perfect place for a paint ball game.

Other than the spookiness of our campground’s status, it only had two drawbacks: it was cold, and there was no drinking water available. This was a problem because we only had about half a liter of extra-strong lemonade to drink. We were surrounded by patches of snow, and a creek ran nearby, but we don’t have a pot or water purification devices. It was getting too late to go anywhere else, and Berck had already gotten the car stuck in the snow once.

At least there was plenty of firewood, including some National Forest sign posts that had been sawed up and stuck in a pile. I’m not sure if they were meant for firewood, but one of those huge logs made a nice fire. We had some hot soup and some HOT Wolf chili, unfortunately, since we didn’t have any drinking water to wash it down. But we ate a couple of oranges and felt better.

We ended up saving the lemonade for the morning. That was a mistake, because it got so cold that the lemonade froze solid. We were warm enough in our sleeping bags, but to conserve heat, we partially closed the vent in the top of the tent. That was also a mistake, because we woke up to find the inside of the tent covered in frost that was quickly melting and raining on us. Hopefully, our tent and accouterments will have time to dry out tonight before we have to re-enter them.

We just passed through Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Park. Most of the “forest” has been carted out over the last hundred and fifty years by souvenir hunters and gem enthusiasts. Petrified wood is beautiful stuff. Fortunately, there’s probably a bunch of it still buried beneath the hills, waiting for the nine inches of rain the park receives to uncover it all.

Now we’re driving through Winslow, AZ listening to The Eagles’ “Take It Easy.”

We’re back on an Interstate, having left them pretty much behind since San Antonio. Wrestling with truckers again.

Just went to the Meteor Crater. 12 bucks a person to get in! They’ve surrounded the crater with three miles of chain-link and barbed-wire to make sure you don’t get a free look at it. It’s big. Twenty foot-ball games with two million seated spectators could fit in it. All from a chunk of rock 150 feet in diameter. At least they’ve got a decent “State of the Art Museum.” My favorite was the meteor generator, where you got to pick the velocity, size, density, and angle of a meteor hitting the earth, then watch animation of the consequences.