August 20th, 2021 … Summer of Fun continues! Day 24 Route 66 Caravan – Winslow, AZ

A quick trip to the Safeway grocery in Holbrook gave us bigger rewards than just groceries. We were able to drive through town on the original Route 66 and got to see the Wigwam Motel! Frank A. Redford was the first to put into practice the strange notion that Americans would want to sleep in concrete replicas of Indian teepees. He opened his Wigwam Village No. 2 in Cave City, Kentucky, in 1937. Village No.1, a smaller prototype in Horse Cave, KY, was bulldozed in 1982.

Chester Lewis, an Arizona motel owner, visited Redford's village not long after it opened, liked the idea, bought the rights to the design, and erected four more Wigwam Villages over the next two decades. The motel in Holbrook was built in 1950, and is among three that survived and still operate today. The others are the one in Cave City, one built by Redford in Rialto, California, and a copycat, but correctly named, Tee Pee Motel in Wharton, Texas.

The Wigwam Motel in Holbrook closed in 1982, and Chester Lewis died in 1986. His widow and children, however, still believed in Chester's dream, restored and reopened the 15 rooms in 1988, and continue to operate it. Since The Wigwam Motel stands adjacent to what was once Route 66, it draws a lot of business from nostalgia buffs. Recreating a 1950s-era motel by parking vintage cars around the property. Holbrook's teepees are most postcard-esque when only the ringer cars are home. The retro atmosphere evaporates when a couple of SUVs and a boxy KIA pull in for the night.

  

We caravanned from Holbrook to Meteor Crater RV Park west of Winslow Arizona. It was a quick 60-mile trip, so not much to see and we drove along I-40. There was several signs for the largest petrified tree, nicknamed Geronimo. Looks like it is another tourist trap, along Route 66!

 

The Little Colorado River despite its name, is one of the largest tributaries of the Grand Canyon, forming a dramatic narrow gorge that stays deep and enclosed for 45 miles across the flat plains of the Painted Desert in the Navajo Indian Reservation. So when the highway crosses the river the cliffs are only 100 feet high and the canyon floor is wide and bushy. The cliffs recede completely a little way east, though the river extends a long distance further to its origin on the slopes of Mount Baldy near Springerville, on the way tumbling over a few cascades including 185 foot Grand Falls. The falls are visible for just three or four months each year, however, as the river flows only during spring and after summer monsoons; for the rest of the time the Little Colorado and its gorge are largely dry apart from the lowest 13 miles, downstream of Blue Spring.

Most people would describe Meteor Crater as a big hole in the ground, but it is so much more than that. 50,000 year ago, on a semi-desert plain as far as you can see. Suddenly, out of the northeastern sky, a pinpoint of light grew rapidly into a brilliant meteor. This body was probably broken from the core of an asteroid during an ancient collision in the main asteroid belt some half billion years ago. Hurtling at about 26,000 miles per hour, it was on an intercept course with Earth. In seconds, it passed through our atmosphere with almost no loss of velocity or mass.

In a blinding flash... a huge iron-nickel meteorite or dense cluster of meteorites, estimated to have been about 150 feet across and weighing several hundred thousand tons, struck the rocky plain with an explosive force greater than 20 million tons of TNT. Any meteorite material that did not vaporize or melt was either thrown out during excavation or mixed with the fragmented rock that remained in the crater. Moving at hyper-velocity speed, this impact generated immensely powerful shock waves in the meteorite, the rock and the surrounding atmosphere. In the air, shock waves swept across the level plain devastating all in their path for a radius of several miles. In the ground, as the meteorite penetrated the rocky plain, pressures rose to over 20 million pounds per square inch, and both iron and rock experienced limited vaporization and extensive melting.

The result of these violent conditions was the excavation of a giant bowl-shaped cavity. In seconds, a crater 700 feet deep, over 4,000 feet across, and 2.4 miles in circumference was carved into this once-flat rocky plain. During its formation, over 175 million tons of limestone and sandstone were abruptly thrown out to form a continuous blanket of debris surrounding the crater for a distance of over a mile. Large blocks of limestone, the size of small houses were heaved onto the rim. Flat-lying beds of rock in the crater walls were overturned in fractions of a second and uplifted permanently as much as l50 feet. Fragments of rock and iron-nickel, some as large as a few feet across, were thrown as far as several miles away.

We took a guided tour along a short portion of the rim, on a paved path. From our guide, we learned about how they mined inside the crater. Philadelphia lawyer and mining engineer Daniel Moreau Barringer firmly believed the crater was the result of a meteoric impact. Enticed by the prospect of finding a large body of iron and nickel beneath the crater floor, Barringer and partner Benjamin C. Tilghman formed the Standard Iron Co. in 1903, after obtaining a patented group of mining claims on 2 square miles of land signed by President Theodore Roosevelt. S.F. Holsinger, a former Forest Service employee in charge of the exploration, discovered the largest meteorite at the site, weighing 1,406 pounds.

Barringer invested more than half a million dollars in an extensive onsite drilling program over several decades in the sandstone and limestone beds, including a shaft reaching a depth of 1,376 feet. Barringer’s commercial venture was over, however, once churn drills were impeded by masses of meteoric material composed of oxidized meteoric iron below 1,250 feet. A short-lived mining operation that involved a group of Phoenix investors in the late 1940s worked the high grade silica sands on the southerly slope of Meteor Crater for use in the flint glass industry. The sand was processed at Sunshine Station, on the main line of the Santa Fe Railroad 6 miles north of the crater. A major discovery in 1960 by Eugene Shoemaker was the presence inside the crater of coesite, a high-pressure form of silica (SiO2) and stishovite. The presence of these minerals confirmed Barringer’s hypothesis since these minerals could only be created through impact and not through volcanism.

We learned how NASA used the crater and how movies used the crater. During the 1960’s, Eugene Shoemaker trained NASA astronauts at the crater to prepare for the Apollo missions to the Moon. A life size cut out of an astronaut and an American flag pay homage to their efforts. “Starman”, released in 1984, is the most popular movie filmed at the crater. In John Carpenter's "Starman," Jeff Bridges makes a desperate run for Meteor Crater. We are watching the movie tonight at the campground.

On the way back to the building, a scooter could not handle the hill ... thanks to all who helped get everyone off the rim safely! This picture is for you Marilyn! 

We drove back into Winslow to enjoy some dinner at RelicRoad Brewing Company. The beers were cold and the meals were delicious! 

We sat at the bar and had a view of the chefs and sous chefs. These guys worked hard and steady the whole time we were there! 

 

We were told the chips were the best! We had to try them! Naturally, Charlie had french fries!

Each year thousands of people, usually on the way to somewhere else, make a stop in Winslow, Arizona, thanks to Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey and thanks to the Eagles’ classic “Take It Easy.” People go to a special corner, where Old Highway 66 meets North Kinsley Avenue, and just stand, which is exactly what you’re supposed to do. It’s called “Standin’ on the Corner Park.” There’s not much there — a statue of a guy holding a guitar and a red flatbed Ford at the curb. They say if you look hard enough, you’ll see the girl from the song, too. In fact, they’ve made sure of it.

The 1972 song “Take it Easy” preceded the park by three decades, and you have to wonder why it took Winslow so long. Perhaps it’s because the city didn’t need it in 1972, when Old 66 went through the heart of town, only to be cruelly bypassed in 1979 when Interstate 40 cut it off. This move was “bleeding Winslow dry” and a way to bring people back was needed … “Standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, was just what the town needed! We were among the estimated 100,000 people who will visit this same spot over the next 12 months, drawn by nostalgia to a town whose best days ended decades ago.

Thanks for the sunset pic, Marilyn Wilson!

Thanks to Lynda & Erick and Joann & Paul for rigging up everything we needed to watch “Starman” under the stars, just 5 miles from Meteor Crater!

Another stellar day on our #Route66RVcaravan with #yankeeRVtours

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