Ten years ago today, I had just embarked upon one of the grandest adventure expeditions of my life. On July 6, 1999 I was staying in Room 639 of the Krasnojarsk Hotel, in the capital of Siberia, faced with a most difficult situation.

A few months earlier the eminent adventurer, science writer, and astronomer, Professor Roy Gallant invited me to join him on the first-ever international expedition to the Popigai Crater at the northern edge of Siberia, on the Tamyr Peninsula. This vast meteorite crater, approximately 100 km in diameter was formed about 35 million years ago by the cataclysmic impact of a large chunk of a stony asteroid. During World War II and on into the 1960s, the Russians mined great quantities of industrial grade diamonds from the crater, and those diamonds were formed by the heat and pressure of the meteorite impact.

A Russian Mi-8 helicopter lands our team inside the Arctic Circle

Planning the expedition was a logistical nightmare and would take Roy and his staff three years. Even though mining had ceased at the crater, it was still a top secret area and before we could travel there we had to be “invited” by the KGB. That was the easy part. There are no roads, trails or airstrips up there, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, so we were to be airlifted by ex-military helicopters. Airlifted right into the crater itself. And that’s where the trouble started. Although we held all the proper paperwork, and had paid all the proper gratuities, it seems we somehow neglected to grease the palm of one local province director. He was quite irritated by that and started leaning on the helicopter outfit to make trouble for us. Everyone on the eighteen-person team—nine Russians and nine Americans—realized that once we were dropped off at the edge of the world, the helicopter team might not come back to get us. There would be no hiking out from that spot but we voted unanimously to go anyway.

Soaring above the Arctic tundra on the way to the Popigai meteorite crater, Siberia

Before departing from the tiny, forsaken outpost of Khatanga, our team was treated to a fine lunch of red caviar and reindeer burgers, washed down with numerous glasses of exquisite Russian vodka, at the most northerly bar in the world. The team member seated next to me didn’t drink alcohol and—despite my insistent whispering in his ear: “It’s a big insult to our hosts if you don’t drink the vodka—he refused. My father’s parents were White Russians, so I felt it my honorable duty to drink his vodka as well, discretely swapping my empty glass for his, repeatedly. So, by the time we lifted off in the loud and rickety Mi-8 chopper, I was more than a little tipsy.

Our bright orange aircraft had no regular seats, just a long wooden bench on one side of the cabin. The bench was full, so I flopped down on our pile of luggage and equipment. The first officer quickly appeared and told me I couldn’t sit there. “But there’s nowhere else to sit,” I protested.

“Pliz leesten,” he insisted. “Begs are on top ov cargo door, you see? Sometimz in flight cargo door open by accident end all begs go fshhhoot, to ground. End you too.” So I got up without further complaint and eventually talked my way into standing at the rear of the flight deck.

Casting shadows on Siberia as we fly over endless pine forests

The Popigai Crater is so large that you cannot really tell you are inside it. There is a sense of being below ground level, and there are mountains of debris many miles away, but any understanding of the scale of the impact feature is difficult to grasp consciously. We spent nine days inside the crater, camping on two separate islands perched in the middle of the chilly Rassokha River that runs through it. We hiked, and we and traveled by raft. Our Russian comrades used just the one chainsaw to build a mess tent, seats, benches, a radio mast, and a cargo raft from the surrounding pine trees.

Home is where the canvas is: the warm and welcoming mess tent fashioned by our Russian comrades from Siberian pine trees

We weren’t looking for meteorites. The original impactor was rich in iron, and eroded away during the long millennia since the crater-forming event. But the meteorite’s signature was everywhere, in the form of impactites—terrestrial rocks that have been shocked, melted or otherwise altered by the effects of meteorite bombardment.

Katya, our translator and chief of staff found a marvelous fossil mammoth tooth during one of our raft trips

We also found mosquitos by the thousands. During the brief Arctic summer the sun never sets, the top few inches of tundra thaw out, and terrifying hordes of large Siberian insects appear to prey on reindeer and, in 1999, us. Despite the hardships, or perhaps because of them, it was an extraordinary adventure. I got to cross the Arctic Circle for the first time in my life, hike through the screaming wilderness with eminent Russian geologists, see the midnight sun, and spend more than a week inside one of the largest impact sites on earth. We even found some tiny diamonds, frozen forever inside melted rock.

View of the Painted Rocks from my campsite. The exposure reveals hundreds of feet of meteorite impactite that was once the floor of the crater. This photograph was taken exactly at midnight; the sun never set for the duration of our expedition.

I fell in love with Russia and will return one day, and here is the memory that sticks with me most vividly: On one of our last nights, after an arduous 14-hour voyage on river rafts, I stood with a group of Russian scientists on an unknown sandy island at 4 am, drinking vodka out of tin cups. With the assistance of our long-suffering translator, Katya, we began exchanging jokes, communicating properly, at last, through the universal language of humor. Several of those men were important researchers during the Cold War era and were denied the luxury of international travel. They had never met an American in real life, and the discovery that surprised and astonished them the most was that we—we Americans—had a sense of humor. What was the Politburo telling them about us?

We laughed long into what should have been the night (the sun never sets in July in Siberia), clinking tin cups together in the wind and understanding, at long last, that we Russians and Americans were not so very different after all.

If you head east out of Las Vegas on the interstate and take the exit for 93 North you will quickly spy one of my favorite road signs in the United States: “The Great Basin Highway.” By modern standards 93 is not exactly a highway but it is a marvelous long stretch of fast two-lane blacktop that runs through some grand and startling scenery.

An abandoned miner's cottage east of US 93

I imagine most who drive the quiet road are unaware that about 370 million years ago they would have been traveling through a warm, shallow sea, speckled with coral reefs, thriving with life. Fewer still will realize that once they pass Hancock Summit, where the road climbs sharply, bends, and then heads, unnervingly straight, to the north, they are entering the remains of a truly gigantic and ancient meteorite crater.

Most meteorites are rich in the element iron, so prolonged exposure to terrestrial elements will cause them to decay. The meteorite that crashed here, before mammals and birds learned to walk and fly, is long gone, but it leaves the traces of its passing within the hills and mountains of Lincoln County.

Mine workings on a precipice in the Nevada Mountains

A breccia (pronounced “brech — ee — uh”) is a rock composed of fragments of other rocks, cemented together. When a large meteorite hits our planet, shatters the target rock at the point of impact, and the resulting mixed-up pieces are compacted together by heat and pressure, an impact breccia is formed. If you climb far enough up into the hills around Tempiute Mountain, Nevada, and know where to look, you’ll see a profusion of them.

An outcrop of the Alamo impact breccia in the Nevada mountains. The rock hammer is included for scale.

Named after a nearby town, the Alamo Breccia covers an area of hundreds of square miles, making it one of the world’s largest remnant meteorite craters. The inferno that followed the impact must have exterminated all life for scores of miles in every direction. An atomic bomb would have been a firework in comparison. The meteorite slammed into the long-vanished ocean, and exploded among the coral reefs. Tiny fossils, embedded in the breccia, tell the story. To learn more about impactites see “Ghostly Footprints of Ancient Meteorites” on Geology.com.

Once below sea level, the Alamo layer has been raised thousands of feet and exposed, in places, by geological processes. To the casual observer, the breccia layer might appear much like any other stratum of ordinary rock, but a studied look will reveal a multi-colored kaleidoscope of angular fragments, pulverized by a cataclysmic meteoritic event. When cut and polished, the Alamo Breccia is as lovely as a Paul Klee painting. And it takes a feat of imagination to peer from a mountainside at 8,000 feet, then tell yourself you are standing on something that once lay at the bottom of a submerged crater.

A cut and polished section of the Alamo Breccia. The white area, bottom left, is fossil coral. Photograph by Leigh Anne DelRay.

I recently returned from my fourth visit to the Alamo Breccia site. Usually, not much changes up there in the Nevada mountains, in terms of human time at least. But I noted with interest a couple of new mines, perched most precariously on steep and dangerous cliff faces. How did they get all the equipment up there? Mules? Even my sturdy 4WD Tacoma, veteran of many a scary off-road moment, could not possibly make the trip; it is a demanding hike on steep and treacherous trails.

With their diminutive railroad tracks, and Seven Dwarves-sized entrances, those hidden mines looked like something out of a classic western film. I immediately thought of bears, then rattlesnakes, and finally mountain lions, but recklessly crept inside two of mine entrances anyway. I half expected to see Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart hunched in the darkness, tending a small fire and arguing about how to divide up the gold.

Spooky mine entrance near Tempiute Mountain, Nevada

They don’t make movies like Treasure of the Sierra Madre anymore, but one thing holds true: Wherever there are valuable rocks, no matter how difficult they may be to reach, some enterprising prospector will stake a claim and eke a hard living out of the buried veins.

All photographs by the author unless otherwise noted. © Geoffrey Notkin. All rights reserved, copyright strictly enforced.