Feckless Friday: Aerial Reconnaissance Challenge

Today’s image challenge again comes from NASA’s Earth Observatory. This is an aerial image of a famous location.

Can you guess the location using only this aerial view?

My first aerial challenge was last week and I’m going to try to make this a regular thing.

I hope you enjoy this challenge. And yes, once again, Google Maps was not used in any way in this post.

A bigger image of this sample and a ground view image of the location will be available after the jump.

When you are ready to give up or check your answer, hit the jump.

First, here’s a link to the original full size image.

Did you guess that it was the Grand Canyon? I imagine this challenge was probably easier than last week’s. A lot easier.

The Grand Canyon is located in the state of Arizona. While working on this post I was a little surprised to learn it was so close to Las Vegas. It’s about 100 miles from downtown Las Vegas to the “center” of the Grand Canyon, and the western portion of the Grand Canyon is probably more like 70 miles. (As the crow flies.)

The Grand Canyon became a national park in 1919, three years after the National Park Service was established. In 1919 the park received about 40,000 visitors. Today the park receives about 5 million visitors a year.

President Theodore Roosevelt was a major proponent of preservation of the Grand Canyon area, and visited it on numerous occasions to hunt and enjoy the scenery.

Other didja know facts:

• Canyon tourists and residents of Supai, a town located in the bottom of the canyon, were evacuated from the Supai area on and August 17-18, 2008, due to a break in the earthen Redlands Dam, located upstream of Supai, after a night of heavy rainfall.

• In 1956 the Grand Canyon was the site of the deadliest commercial aviation disaster in history at the time.On the morning of June 30, 1956, a TWA Lockheed Super Constellation and a United Airlines Douglas DC-7 departed Los Angeles International Airport within three minutes of one another on eastbound transcontinental flights. Approximately 90 minutes later, the two propeller-driven airliners collided above the canyon while both were flying in unmonitored airspace.The wreckage of both planes fell into the eastern portion of the canyon, on Temple and Chuar Buttes, near the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers. The disaster killed all 128 passengers and crew members aboard both planes.

Some information on this page originally appeared on the Wikipedia: Grand Canyon page.