Lunar Crater

Standing alone at night on the rim of a giant crater in a desert beneath the Milky Way, I had two strong feelings. First, I viscerally understood why Neil Armstrong said the lunar surface “has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States”. True enough, that night in the high desert of the United States looked to me a lot like pictures of the moon. Second, and more powerfully, I suddenly felt like all that open space was somehow crushing me, this tiny creature on the side of a cliff beneath the vastness of that black, endless, infinite sky.

It lasted just a few seconds but I doubt I’ll forget it. Just an hour before I’d said to Yon, “this must be how Neil and Buzz felt – the only humans here, just the three of us and our little base”. Now, she lay in the tent easing our daughter to sleep and I fiddled with my telescope and camera. It’s probably the closest experience I’ll ever have to being an astronaut on the moon, working with experiments on some strange barren surface far from home.

Lunar Crater is a volcanic formation, known as a “maar”. Such a crater is formed by the huge explosion you get when hot lava or magma meets groundwater. Try to imagine the power of that explosion. Lunar Crater is 120 meters deep. For people to make a crater 100 meters deep – like Sedan Crater, also in Nevada – it took a hydrogen bomb more than five times the yield of the bomb that obliterated Nagasaki in World War Two. Bomb yields are a complex topic, and a lot depends on whether the bomb was airburst, like over Nagasaki, or buried underground, like the Sedan Test, but the fact remains, to get a crater like Lunar Crater, “you’re gonna need a bigger bomb”. An even bigger bomb than Sedan created a similar-sized crater in Kazakhstan, now full of water and named Lake Chagan. Natural maars craters are often also full of water.

The Storax Sedan nuclear test deliberately made a crater 100 meters deep in 1962; imagine something similar but natural creating Lunar Crater, without the massive radioactive contamination. Image: US Government, public domain, via Wikipedia.

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Lunar Crater in a satellite image via Google Earth. Nearby are numerous remnant or partial cinder cones.

I found Lunar Crater on Google Earth while studying the route for our summer 2019 Nevada road trip. While few people come here, we naturally were not the first. And we weren’t even the first “astronauts”. Because one of my favourite Apollo era astronauts, Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan, came here in 1972 with his crewmate Harrison Schmitt to practice geology. The place really does look like the moon, although the vast majority of actual lunar craters are impact craters caused by meteoroids smashing into the moon over billions of years.

*Harrison Schmitt (l) and Gene Cernan (r) practice geology* and lunar surface photography at Lunar Crater prior to their 1972 Apollo 17 mission. Schmitt was the only scientist to fly to the Moon; Cernan was Commander of Apollo 17 and had already flown to the Moon, without landing, on Apollo 10. He also flew on Gemini 9A. Photo: NASA, public domain.

Schmitt (l) and Cernan (r) near lunar crater. *Photo: NASA, public domain.*

This place is deep in the desert of Nevada, a good eight miles (nearly 13 km) along a dusty two-track dirt road off the already-remote Route 6 about 100 miles (160km) from Ely or 84 miles (135 km) from Tonopah, the two nearest settlements of any kind. Driving in, my heart rate was a little elevated – unlike Neil’s during the lunar landing, with his nerves of steel. I was a bit concerned about getting stuck, because while we had plenty of food and water in the car, there was no phone service and if I couldn’t solve the problem it would be a long, incredibly hot walk back to Route 6 to wait for the very occasional car. But the track surface was firm and I got more confident as we went along.

About halfway along the road sweeps past this dry lake

Distances are deceptive – this monster of a blown-out cinder cone seemed close but is actually 7 km away.

It was unbelievably windy when we pulled up at the crater rim, and even at 6pm it was well over 35 degrees C. There was no shade, and no windbreak, so we quickly pitched our tent. Our kid howled briefly when the beach sun-shelter we pitched for her buckled under the roaring blast of desert heat, but after I strung up a tarp and repositioned the car, she was happier. We heated up some frijoles on the small stove and enjoyed some pretty decent tacos while huddled away from the wind and relentless sun.

The wind eased and the sun set – eventually, finally! – and we used the dusk to hike up to the top of the hill. Black volcanic gravel crunched and tough desert shrubs swooshed as we did. This place was empty. Not a soul in sight, and other than the trail, no sign of humanity. We couldn’t see the highway, nor hear it; there were no people anywhere. A few planes flew high overhead but they felt as far removed from where we were as the ISS does when it flies overhead (which it did, bright as a flashlight). Before that lowering sun, everything glowed red and yellow, before fading to red, purple and blue. By the time we reached the hilltop, stars were coming out with a crescent moon. It was bright enough to walk back to our little Tranquility Base without a torch.

Well after dark, that wind picked up again. It was so strong and the gusts so unpredictable that I couldn’t do any more work with the tripod, so I crawled into the tent and stared up at the dark night sky. The kid woke, too hot, and I stuck her outside by the door. We stared at the sky together until she was ready to sleep again. Born and bred in Beijing, where a bright sky has about seven stars, this time in Nevada must have seemed incredible to her.

Knowing how unbearably hot the next day would be, we set our alarm for before six and woke at dawn. Yon walked, I photographed, the kid slept. By eight thirty it was time to leave, with a big yellow sun just getting started on frying us slowly. There was not even time to circumnavigate the crater; just long enough to get to a point opposite our campsite and enjoy the wildflowers and the deep expanse of the crater.