These are some pictures from the weekend trip to West Texas which was
primarily to use up a Southwest free round trip before it would have expired.
(Other possible destinations were considered. This had award seats available
at convenient times.)
The destination was the
Sierra Madera impact crater
about 15 miles south of Fort Stockton TX.
I also got pictures of Blue Origin's
spaceport site north of Van Horn TX.
I had an interest in seeing a confirmed impact crater site because my friends
and I believe we've found a previously undocumented
impact crater at Nevada's Black Rock Desert.
It needed to be one large enough to have a central uplift structure,
which only happens with craters wider than roughly 10km.
So Meteor Crater (a.k.a. Barringer Crater) in Arizona, at 1km,
isn't wide enough.
By all accounts, Sierra Madera is the best one to see.
All photos and rock samples were taken from public areas on US Highway 385.
Except for the highway, the crater is on private property.
I talked with the land owner at the La Escalera Ranch, where the ranch houses
are located within the crater.
He says "everyone" asks but he can't grant permission
due to liability concerns. He was very polite about it.
Where the road skirts the edge of the Sierra Madera hills that are
the central uplift of the impact crater, it is possible to pick up
rocks with examples of "shatter cones" without leaving public land.
I lucked out that the rocks I wanted to look at were available
anyway.
So far it looks encouraging for the research in Nevada.
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