Hoover Dam, Meteo Crater and the Boneyard.

Away, away from Nevada and all its countless hazards to the sunny state of Arizona! And our first stop here is, of course, Hoover Dam!

At the entrance our car is being stopped for inspection by the vigilant Hoover Dam police that makes sure that we are not carrying illegal aliens or explosives: bombs, etc…

Of course, we do not. We couldn’t care less about bombs; instead we are carrying the glorious Flag of Greenland, which in a matter of minutes we will plant on top of the Dam!

It is +43C this morning and we are about to climb the height of a 100+ story building. This is not an easy task. 725 feet up – that’s how high Hoover Dam is. But the newly built Hoover Dam Bypass stands even higher – dwarfing the Dam itself.

From here you can easily ascend to heavens. Winds are brutal here. During our ascend we almost lose Little Jaaku to one of the furious gusts.

At 11:35 we plant the Flag of Greenland at the summit. Now we look at Hoover Dam from above. Stuck in the middle of the desert it reminds of a colossal monster too heavy to move. Hundreds of humans, like microbes, are constantly crawling up and down its cement spine.

As we leave Hoover Dam police is watching us with precision. But indeed, there is nothing more solid than Hoover Dam. Nothing, absolutely nothing can break it. Maybe only an asteroid or a meteorite. And that’s why our next destination will be a Meteo Crater   - a place where a tiny asteroid travelling at 18 km per second collided with Earth some 50,000 years ago.

It’s hard to understand why such a quiet and boring place like this had attracted the first and best preserved meteorite in America.

Look at this giant hole in the ground, nearly a mile across and over 500 feet deep! Feel the Impact! But of course, we have seen holes bigger than this one: in Siberia. Tunguska Blast in 1908  produced a crater 45 km wide!

Daniel Barringer, a mining engineer from Philadelphia, bought the Crater in 1903 and drilled a 1,400 foot deep hole to find gold and other precious metals. He found nothing and died soon after he ran out of money. But now the family business is flourishing since millions of tourists are buying “Crater Dust” and other goodies for 10 dollars a bag.

50,000 years have passed since, but nothing still grows here, and nothing lives. 

 I wonder what kind of clean-up is necessary to make this land livable again?

Unattractive for animals and plants, this place still lures humans. Astronauts scheduled for the Apollo Moon Missions trained at the Crater in the 60-s. And here is the evidence: a cardboard cutout of a fellow in a space suit next to an American flag in the very center of the Crater and a test capsule named Boiler Plate 29A which NASA gave to Barringer family as a gift.

To our deep disappointment, not a single person whom we interviewed along the perimeter of the Crater knows “How far is Greenland?” One visitor from Utah suggests that it is in Colorado. So, in circumstances given we just can’t leave without planting the Flag of Greenland at the bottom of the Crater. But this is not an easy task. The bottom of the Crater is out of reach: Barringer family does not want anyone even close to it. The only solution is to plant it from the distance.

 We use a miniature copy of a Greenland Flag and a little Indian arrow that we bought in the local Indian store as a carrier.

 In a blink of an eye our little flag is gone with wind! If you enlarge the screen you may see it  - right in the center of the Crater.

From Meteo Crater we drive to another major graveyard: 'The Boneyard', an aerospace storage and maintenance facility at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. This is the place where old fighters and bombers  come to die.

Local air – dry and clean – makes Tucson’s Boneyard an ideal place for afterlife. There is literally no corrosion and the soil is so firm that even the heaviest of the planes do not sink.

It is +45 this morning. The only shade we can find is under the dead jet.

Here Little Jaaky finds a match: the world’s tiniest airplane that looks like a little bee. The Starr Bumble Bee I.

And here he also gets to sit on the B57 Nuclear Bomb.

The day in Arizona brings new emotions and new friends. And finally we discover people who not only know ‘how far Greenland is”, but can also locate Uummannaq on the map. Young and handsome NATO fighter pilots from Norway befriend Little Jaaku and take him out for dinner at a local diner. Their relationship with Greenland? Simple: they fly in the Arctic and constantly they see Greenland under the wing.

From the Graveyards we head to Petrified Forest. It straddles the border between Apache County and Navajo County in northeastern Arizona.

It is famous for it fossils, of early dinosaurs and especially of fallen trees that lived in the Late Triassic period of the Mesozoic era and that many people living today are still trying to steel. Why would anyone need a petrified tree at all?

It is so hot here, that Little Jaaku is being slowly petrified. People wandering around Petrified Forest are genuinely nice to us. Every single person is trying to touch Little Jaaku and everyone compliments his fabulous polar bear pants. But still no luck in achieving our main mission: finding out “how far Greenland is”.

As we are being checked for stolen petrified trees in the trunk of our Beamer, a massive thunderstorm shakes the ancient Petrified Forest and a much welcomed rain falls on our roof.

Thunder, rain and then finally - a double rainbow growing right out of the high way. It moves as we move, reminding us once again that life is a happy illusion.

We are on our way to Coconino National Forest, we stop in the local Indian stores which are incredibly entertaining...

and buy cheap Indian blankets because cool Sedona with its chilling +18C is awaiting for us.

 Finally, after two more rains and three thunderstorms, we are in the Red Rocks of Sedona where many of Hollywood's classic westerns were filmed.

And here our search for Greenland in the sunny state of Arizona comes to an end.

We did not find Greenland, but we were happy with what we saw. Some parts of Arizona look like steppe, other parts  - like rain forest, and  other parts  - like a Moon. This is a great state to live in and to visit alike.