Virtual me rode my bike into the northeastern corner of California, my 26th state, yesterday. That was 42 days spent in Oregon this time, 71 days total when you add in the earlier entry en route to LIGO Hanford.
Today I walked a bit further and arrived at the destination for Leg 32. It’s a pretty nondescript piece of desolate, scrubby land, on a road forsaken by the Street View car, but like Oregon City it’s the discovery site of a significant meteorite. The Goose Lake Meteorite, found in 1938, is named for, um, Goose Lake, which is nearby. It’s 1170 kilograms of iron, and yet there was no crater at the site. Vagn F. Buchwald, in the Handbook of Iron Meteorites, suggests it could have been carried from its original impact site to Goose Lake by lava flows, the meteorite showing signs of reheating above 400°C; Buchwald also allows the possibility it was transported by glacier action, like the Willamette meteorite, and later subjected to heat from intense forest fires.
Goose Lake meteorite on display
However it got there, it later went by more mundane means to Washington, DC, where it remains on exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History.
I’ve walked another 1.6 kilometers (retracing my steps southward — getting to the meteorite site involved going south from Oregon for several miles and then back north again — on Corral Creek Road for the moment) to start off Leg 33. You can see from the title of this post, by the way, I’m close to the 10,000 km mark. Or the 10 megameter mark, if you prefer. I expect I’ll reach that milepost… kilometerpost… around the middle of next week.
A map showing my progress is here (I’ve done some work on it, it’s now easier to see what destinations I’ve been to), a spreadsheet with progress detail is here, and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder. Present coordinates: 41.972°N, 120.523°W.
| previous: | Earthwalk Day 958 (6 September 2024), 9641 km |
| next: | Let's not go there |