Earthwalk Day 1346 (29 September 2025), 13,599 km: Arizona State Capitol and some meteorites

At one point I decided the minimum length for a leg is 7 km, based on that being around 10,000 steps, roughly a day’s walking. Any destinations closer together would be considered joint destinations for a single leg.

But today I was on my bike, and I blew past both the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix and the Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies in Tempe, about 18 km apart. I’m calling them joint destinations for Leg 51.

So, Phoenix. A state capital, containing a state capitol. Remember state capitols? It’s been about ten months and 17 legs since the last one. The Arizona State Capitol building was completed in 1901, and that original building now houses… none of the three branches of the state government. They’ve all moved into other buildings and additions, and the original building is now a museum.

Unlike state capitals like Carson City, Lansing, or Annapolis, Phoenix is a place you would have heard of even if it wasn’t the state capital. It’s the fifth most populous city in the United States. Its top four employers are Banner Health, the state of Arizona, Amazon, and Walmart. Which probably says something.

The Buseck Center is on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University. It has the world’s largest university-based meteorite collection. It includes a piece of the Murchison meteorite, which yielded the first evidence of extraterrestrial amino acids in 1970. Of course, said meteorite produced dozens of fragments spread over 13 square kilometers, so who knows how many meteorite collections have a piece of it.

I’m heading south now, 10 km into Leg 52.

A map showing my progress is here, a spreadsheet with progress detail is here, and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder. Present coordinates: 33.342°N, 111.946°W.