frosty
Black Canyon: Western slope of Colorado, southeast of Grand Junction. We got a campsite in the park.
I thought that after Zion, the North Rim, Bryce, and Canyonlands I would have been done with canyons. Nope. Black Canyon was different than all the others, because it’s not in the Colorado Plateau red rock country, for one reason. For another, the park brochure had this quote, which describes it better than I can.
“Some are longer, some are deeper, some are narrower, and a few have walls as steep,” writes geologist Wallace Hansen. “But no other canyon in North America combines the depth, narrowness, sheerness and somber countenance of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.” The Gunnison River eroded through hard metamorphic rock in 2 to 3 million years, a third of the time that the Colorado took to carve the Grand Canyon through sedimentary layers.
We had a campsite in the park which made sightseeing easy. We pulled out the eBikes to travel the 7-mile South Rim Road and stop at a few of the overlooks. The next day we drove out to the end and hiked the Warner Point Nature Trail and I hiked out and back the Rim Rock Trail.
On The Road – frosty – Black Canyon of the Gunnison National ParkPost + Comments (17)
Black Canyon, upstream from Warner’s Point. One thing that makes this canyon different than Grand Canyon is that it’s easier to see how it cut through the plateau.