July 31 - Arizona

Tuesday was spent traveling east through northern Arizona towards Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I found this fire lookout tower on my map near Jacob Lake , in the Kaibab National Forest of northern Arizona, a high-altitude wooded area. Climbing up to investigate, I found at the top a tiny enclosed office, where worked a very nice woman who chatted with me for a while about her job watching for forest fires.       36.6997, -112.2130 

The road (Arizona ALT 89) winds around the very northeast corner of the Grand Canyon, where I found these curious balanced rocks and houses built into them.

Further east, I passed by Meteor Crater , the tacky, privately run mile-wide hole in the ground created by a giant meteor impact. They wouldn't let visitors hike down into the crater, but they had fixed telescopes pointing at features at the bottom, like the representation of the astronaut in training (in the circular photo below).       35.0280, -111.0220 

The rest of my trip was mostly uneventful — the only features being the impressively camouflaged truck pictured below, and this rainbow over the highway as I drove into a thunderstorm.