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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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