Meteor Crater
— — a round hole the sky punched in the desert.
Not only on a wall.
“A nearly circular bowl pressed into the Colorado Plateau, about three quarters of a mile across and five hundred and fifty feet deep, raised at the rim by a ring of overturned sandstone. The crater is roughly fifty thousand years old, struck by an iron meteor maybe a hundred and fifty feet across travelling at cosmic speed. It is the best preserved impact crater on the planet, partly because it is dry and partly because nothing has had time to bury it. The rim is fenced. The wind across the bowl is loud, then briefly nothing, then loud again.
Meteor Crater, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Meteor Crater, also called Barringer Crater, sits on the southern Colorado Plateau in Coconino County, Arizona, about thirty-seven miles east of Flagstaff and eighteen miles west of Winslow off Interstate 40. The bowl is roughly 1,200 metres in diameter and 170 metres deep, with a raised rim standing about 45 metres above the surrounding plain. It was formed approximately 50,000 years ago by the impact of an iron-nickel meteor, the Canyon Diablo body, estimated at 30 to 50 metres across. The site has been privately held by the Barringer family since 1903.
The site sits at about 5,700 feet above sea level on open high desert, in a basin between the San Francisco Peaks to the west and the Painted Desert to the east. The plateau is dry, around eight to ten inches of rain a year, with cold winters and hot afternoons in summer. The wind off the rim is the part most visitors comment on, steady most of the day and gusting through the gap on the south rim. Apollo astronauts trained here in the 1960s in preparation for lunar geology because the bowl is the cleanest impact basin within easy reach.
The crater is open daily, generally 8:00 to 17:00 with extended hours in summer, and access is through the visitor centre on the south rim. Admission as of 2026 runs about $25 for adults; there is no public hike into the bowl, since the floor is private and protected. Guided rim walks of roughly one hour run several times a day, weather permitting, and reach three observation decks above the southern wall. Bring water, a windbreaker, and shade. The nearest food and lodging are in Winslow, eighteen miles east, and Flagstaff, thirty-seven miles west.