Beth and I took a trip to Grand Canyon a few years ago during a weekend getaway to Las Vegas. This was totally unanticipated and unplanned by me. Of course, this probably had quite a bit to do with the fact that the sum total of my input to her question “what do you want to do in Vegas” was answered by random grunts, gurgles, and rantings about whatever it was I was working on or trying to work on at the time.

I can be such a pain in the ass.

In spite of that, Beth just quietly went on her way in the background and planned everything out. She booked us tickets to see Penn&Teller. She booked us to some other bizarre show involving half-nude women dancing around to the dulcet tones of Billy Idol (apparently it looked good on paper).

She also surprised me with a trip down into the Canyon via helicopter. Now, I was a bit nervous and cranky about the trip at first. Well, maybe a bit nervous is somewhat of a misleading statement. Frantically paranoid maybe? Just a whiney little bitch? Let’s explore….

I’ve always had this amazingly morbid streak since I was a small child. Maybe it’s due to the fact that my parents didn’t take me to the zoo enough, or the fact that my hamster died when I was only a year and a half old. Maybe it was the lead based paint in our house. Maybe it’s just genetics. No matter what the root cause, I kept seeing images of the helicopter slamming into the side of the canyon, as shot by a tourist with a video camera. In the worst version, my explosive death is part of Americas Funniest Home Videos replete with a Bob Saget voiceover and laugh track.

Do you see what my friends and family have to deal with? I’ve always been able to work myself into a frenzy about the most miniscule things. This ability - completely involuntary, mind you - truly borders on the amazing.

Oddly enough, once we showed up at the airport I started to calm down. My concern at that point was less with the fact that I was going to be hovering several hundred feet above the hard desert floor, and more related to the fact that they had gone to great lengths to point out that there were no toilets for 3 hours once we left. So images of fiery wrecks were replaced with thoughts of a gastrointestinal crisis 3 minutes out from the airport.

It sounds so contrived and cliche, but once in the air everything changed. We flew from McCarran Airport in Vegas out towards Hoover Dam and then onto the Canyon. To me, the desert southwest is a beautiful place. The colors of the various rock strata…the cones of the extinct volcanos and the lava flows…and the Canyon. Flying over the rim and down into the Canyon was one of the most exhilarating experiences that I have had. The sheer scale and majesty of the canyon was hard to describe - the most eloquent I could get was “damn, this is big”.

I guess what this post is building up to - the main bullet point to take away, if you will - is the fact that Beth is the coolest wife, and not only because she puts up with me.

Postscript: After leaving Barringer Meteor Crater on our trip to Arizona (described in this post), Bruce and I went off to visit the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I wasn’t too excited about this, after all I had already seen the Grand Canyon. However, that didn’t last much longer than the time it took to walk from our car up to the canyon rim. Nothing like looking out over millions of years of geological history to cut you (and the rest of humanity) right down to size.

There’s really no way around it - travel for work really sucks most of the time. Oh sure, you may invoke some jealousy from your friends when it’s January and you’re in San Diego while they’re in Ohio. But that jealousy quickly fades when you point out that the 25% of the trip you weren’t sleeping in the hotel involved freezing various body parts off in a climate controlled computer room. Or when they reportedly manage to talk to you on the cell phone after you’ve been awake for 36 hours straight.

Amazingly enough, the last few trips have been nothing like that. Call it good planning, good execution, or just plain dumb luck I’ve managed to find time to actually feel like a normal person on the road.

For example, back in March, Bruce and I traveled to Long Beach, California. We had originally planned the entire weekend to address any problems that were encountered in the migration, however things went so smoothly we were done with work early Saturday afternoon with the entire weekend free. So we visited the Long Beach Aquarium that afternoon, and spent Sunday on the RMS Queen Mary and the Scorpion, a Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine.

This April, Bruce and I found ourselves in Chandler, Arizona as part of another migration effort. Initially, we were planning to handle the entire migration. However, the client only wanted us to do a small part of the overall project.

Fair enough, if they wanted to do more work that was fine with us. We were required to be onsite late Sunday afternoon when the system went live in Japan, but other than that we were on our own.

Surprisingly enough, I had spent quite a bit of time prior the migration planning this out. Why? Because a good consultant always anticipates that next step. Barringer Meteor Crater (more commonly known simply as Meteor Crater) in Arizona is one of the places that I’ve always wanted to visit, but - due to it’s remote location - I never expected to actually get there. However, a quick look at the map showed that it was roughly 2 hours from Phoenix. Well within driving distance.

The trip out to North Arizona took a bit longer than planned, but by noon we were driving across a (and I would like to point out I’m not a geologist here, so don’t take any of this as absolute fact) plateau towards the crater. Now, the crater is ostensibly near Winslow, Arizona. However, it’s 35 miles from Winslow. So it’s only near Winslow in the same manner that Akron is near Cleveland.

To get to the visitors center, you leave the highway and drive 10 miles down a side road and over two cattle guards. Off the side of the road are some fairly deep ditches, and a whole lot of scrub and nothing. The full size of the visitors complex only becomes apparent when you come around a final left hand turn past the entrance to the RV Park and into the parking lot. The structure - which is built into the rim, with observation platforms above and below - is entered through a set of stairs.

Once inside, they have a number of displays which explain the science behind meteors. One display contains a giant chunk of the impactor that caused the crater at the site. The meteorite is strangely cold and smooth, a result of it’s composition - the Barringer Meteor Crater was caused by a Nickel-Iron meteor. It’s odd to touch something that spent - very likely - millions of years in the depths of space, tore through the Earth’s atmosphere at an incredible rate of speed and at an incredible temperature and carved out a crater nearly a mile across.

It’s hard to describe the actual crater. It sounds silly, but Bruce actually summed it up when he noted that “it doesn’t look that big”. It’s silly because it doesn’t look that big until you start reading the placards the visitors center has set out pointing out the relative size of the objects in the crater and on the rim that you are looking at. For example, there is a steam engine in the bottom of the crater - a relic of earlier (and unsuccessful) attempts to find a buried impactor (there isn’t one) - that looks no bigger than a small table from the rim. There is boulder the size of a small house on the rim across from the visitors center that looks like something you could kick. And so on.

For me there was one point where I finally “got it” - the perspective finally clicked into place and I was able to comprehend the size and scale of what I was looking at. Then I started thinking about how this place came to be. Picture a quiet day or evening out in desert 50,000 years ago. A streak flashes across the sky, caused by a meteorite some 50 meters in diameter plunging through the atmosphere at a speed of over 12 kilometers per second (over 28,000 miles per hour). When that streak touches the ground, the impact produces an explosion equivalent to over 2.5 megatons of TNT (that’s about 150 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs). The explosion digs out an estimated 175 million tons of rock, and throws pieces of rock weighing in excess of 25 tons outside the rim of the crater. Debris from the event are scattered over an area of approximately 100 square miles. The shockwave produced from this event must have been awful to behold, killing all life off within a fairly wide radius. Post-impact effects to the surrounding areas likely lingered for decades.

It gives a whole new spin to the phrase “the sky is falling”. Which, of course, the gift shop has emblazoned across most every type of touristy knick-nack and souvenir that you could possibly think of.

As Bruce and I drove away, I have to admit to looking up at the sky almost defensively a few times. It only takes a visit to a site like Barringer, a movie showing the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter, or a glance at the cratered face of our moon to realize that cosmic collisions do occur. Surprisingly, few people realize that our planet is passed by meteors, asteroids, and comets on a fairly frequent basis. An effort is made to track these objects, calculate their orbits, and make sure that our planet doesn’t happen to be in the way. The Planetary Society maintains a link here to provide information and raise awareness of these potential impactors.