The Most Beautiful Canyons and Gorges in North America
14 places in 2 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful canyons and gorges in North America are Grand Canyon (United States), Horseshoe Bend (United States) and Sumidero Canyon (Mexico). The list covers 14 canyons and gorges in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 12. Last updated 13 October 2026.
North America holds some of the most dramatic canyons on Earth because of a rare combination: thick layers of sedimentary rock, uplift that raised them high above sea level, and an arid climate that keeps vegetation from softening their walls. The Colorado Plateau is the classic case, where rivers cut down as the land rose, but volcanic islands and the mountains of Mexico add their own deep gorges.
The Grand Canyon is the benchmark, carved by the Colorado River to a depth of about 1.8 kilometres and exposing rocks nearly two billion years old. Nearby, Horseshoe Bend shows the same river looping around a sandstone spur, and Antelope Canyon and Buckskin Gulch are slot canyons so narrow that light filters down in shafts. Canyon de Chelly, on Navajo land, shelters ancient cliff dwellings and the sandstone spire of Spider Rock, while Black Canyon of the Gunnison drops between walls of dark, ancient rock.
Other canyons look very different. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone glows yellow and pink with altered volcanic rock below the Lower Falls, and Waimea Canyon on Kauai cuts red and green slopes into an old shield volcano. In Hawaii's Waipiʻo Valley, cliffs fall to a black-sand beach, and Watkins Glen in New York threads a stone staircase past a series of waterfalls. In Mexico, Copper Canyon is a network of deep gorges in the Sierra Tarahumara, home of the Rarámuri, and Sumidero Canyon rises in sheer walls above the Grijalva River.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Grand Canyon | Canyon | United States | |
| 2 | Horseshoe Bend | Canyon | United States | |
| 3 | Sumidero Canyon | Canyon | Mexico | |
| 4 | Waimea Canyon State Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 5 | Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone | Canyon | United States | |
| 6 | Canyon de Chelly National Monument | Canyon | United States | |
| 7 | Copper Canyon | Canyon | Mexico | |
| 8 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 9 | Antelope Canyon | Canyon | United States | |
| 10 | Buckskin Gulch | Canyon | United States | |
| 11 | Waipiʻo Valley | Canyon | United States | |
| 12 | Watkins Glen State Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 13 | Fern Canyon | Canyon | United States | |
| 14 | Santa Elena Canyon | Canyon | United States |
01 Grand Canyon
United States36.097° N 112.095° W
Image by balder815 from Pixabay How and when the canyon formed is still debated. Many studies place the river's present course at 5 to 6 million years old, while others argue that parts of the canyon were carved much earlier and later linked together. People have lived here for thousands of years; the ancestors of the Havasupai and Hualapai, who still live along the southern side, occupied the area, and the Pueblo peoples regarded it as sacred. The first European to see it was García López de Cárdenas in 1540. John Wesley Powell led the first expedition down the river in 1869 and popularised the name.
Did you know? In 2014 the 1956 crash site became the first National Historic Landmark marking an event that happened in the air.
02 Horseshoe Bend
United States36.879° N 111.514° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The bend is a textbook entrenched meander. The Colorado once wandered over a nearly flat plain; when the region began to rise some 5 to 6 million years ago, the river kept its looping course and cut straight down, locking the curve into solid rock. The walls are Navajo Sandstone, a rock notable for its cross-bedding, the sweeping diagonal lines that run through the cliff faces, and for small iron concretions that weather out of the surface. From the rim you can trace these layers around the full curve of the canyon.
Did you know? The cliffs are Navajo Sandstone, the hardened dunes of a vast desert sand sea laid down in the Early Jurassic, roughly 200 to 190 million years ago.
03 Sumidero Canyon
Cañón del Sumidero
Mexico · 11.9 km from Tuxtla Gutiérrez16.848° N 93.106° W
Sgroey · CC BY-SA 4.0 Most people see it from a boat. Launches run upstream from the old colonial town of Chiapa de Corzo, and the cliffs grow taller with every bend until the sky becomes a strip overhead. Crocodiles bask on the narrow banks, spider monkeys move through the trees clinging to the rock. The most striking single sight is the Árbol de Navidad, a tall waterfall that spills over a cone of rock and vegetation jutting from the cliff, so that the whole thing looks like a giant Christmas tree hung on the canyon wall; in the rainy season, when the flow is strongest, it seems to sparkle.
Did you know? A group of Frenchmen drowned trying to explore the canyon in the nineteenth century, and a Spanish explorer vanished on a solo attempt in 1959.
04 Waimea Canyon State Park
United States · 31.8 km from Līhuʻe22.056° N 159.665° W
Image by TeamHealthy808 from Pixabay Mark Twain is credited with calling it the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific," and the line has stuck to every brochure about the place ever since. It's worth knowing the quote is shakier than it sounds: Twain did tour the Hawaiian islands in 1866, but by most accounts he never actually set foot on Kauaʻi — so the phrase people repeat as his verdict on Waimea is closer to well-worn tourism lore than a documented eyewitness quote.
Did you know? The red walls were once black basalt; the colour comes from millions of years of weathering of the lava.
05 Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
United States44.717° N 110.497° W
Brocken Inaglory · CC BY-SA 3.0 The colours are the work of heat and water. The canyon is cut into rhyolite, a volcanic rock from Yellowstone's ancient lava flows, which hot, acidic hydrothermal water has altered and softened. Iron in the rock oxidises into the yellows and oranges, and the canyon is still geothermally alive, with features such as Calcite Spring visible along its course. The gorge itself is geologically young: it was deepened catastrophically around 14,000 to 18,000 years ago, when glacial ice dams failed and floods tore through the weakened rock.
Did you know? The colours reflect how much water the iron minerals in the rock contain, and geologists describe the canyon as, in effect, slowly rusting.
06 Canyon de Chelly National Monument
United States36.155° N 109.509° W
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay What sets the place apart from other red-rock canyons is that it has never stopped being lived in. People have farmed here for more than four thousand years. Ancestral Puebloans built their houses into alcoves in the cliffs and left the canyons around the mid-1300s; Hopi farmers came after them, and then the Navajo, for whom the canyon remains home. About forty Navajo families still live and farm inside the monument. The land is held in trust for the Navajo Nation — none of it is federally owned — and the National Park Service, which has managed the monument since 1931, does so in partnership with the tribe.
Did you know? It is the only National Park Service unit whose land is owned by a tribe and managed cooperatively with it.
07 Copper Canyon
Barrancas del Cobre
Mexico27.516° N 107.766° W
Jesus Alejandro Guer… · CC BY 3.0 This is the homeland of the Rarámuri, or Tarahumara, a people of perhaps seventy thousand famous for endurance running; their traditional rarajípari race is run over long distances while kicking a wooden ball along canyon paths. The Spanish came for silver: Batopilas, deep in its own gorge at about 600 metres, was a mining centre from the seventeenth century and is now one of Mexico's designated Pueblos Mágicos. The wider sierra also holds some of the country's tallest waterfalls, including Basaseachi and Piedra Volada.
Did you know? The Spanish name Tarahumara derives from Rarámuri, the people's own word, which some scholars interpret as meaning the running people.
08 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay The rock is what gives the place its gravity. The walls expose Precambrian gneiss and schist, metamorphic "basement" rock close to two billion years old, which resists erosion far better than the softer layers that once lay above it. The river began cutting into this hard core roughly two million years ago, and because it could not widen its course, it could only deepen it. Across the canyon from the South Rim, the Painted Wall rises about 2,250 feet, the tallest sheer cliff in Colorado; its dark face is laced with pale, branching stripes of pegmatite — molten rock that once forced its way into cracks and cooled there, leaving a marbling visible from miles away.
Did you know? Hidden beneath the canyon runs the Gunnison Tunnel, a 5.8-mile irrigation tunnel that was the longest of its kind in the world when it opened in 1909.
09 Antelope Canyon
United States36.858° N 111.372° W
Image by Lenzatic from Pixabay That history turned tragic in August 1997, when a flash flood triggered by a storm many miles away — one that hikers already inside the canyon never saw coming — swept through Lower Antelope Canyon and killed eleven people. It remains the deadliest event in the canyon's recent history, and it directly changed how the place operates today: the Navajo Nation, which owns and manages the canyon within the LeChee Chapter, tightened access afterward so that no one enters without an authorized guide, a permit, and awareness of weather conditions upstream.
Did you know? The English name comes from the herds of pronghorn that once roamed freely in and around the canyon.
10 Buckskin Gulch
United States37.002° N 111.866° W
Image by igormattio from Pixabay The gulch lies in southern Kane County, Utah, just north of the Arizona line, inside the Paria Canyon–Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, a protected area of about 112,500 acres designated by Congress in 1984. It is one of the main tributaries of the Paria, which in turn flows south through its own deep canyon to meet the Colorado River at Lees Ferry. The same wilderness holds the sandstone formations of Coyote Buttes, including the swirling outcrop known as the Wave.
Did you know? For most of its length the canyon averages less than ten feet wide, while its walls rise to about 500 feet near the Paria confluence.
11 Waipiʻo Valley
United States20.120° N 155.593° W
Image by SocialButterflyMMG from Pixabay For Hawaiians the valley is far more than scenery. It was the seat and home of many early aliʻi, the ruling chiefs, beginning in tradition with Kahaimoelea and continuing up to the time of King ʻUmi. Its wet floor was one of the great taro landscapes of the islands: estimates suggest some 800 acres of patches once fed perhaps ten thousand people. Tradition also tells that in the 18th century the Maui chief Kahekili II raided the valley and burned its four sacred trees. A handful of taro farms still work the bottomland today.
Did you know? Tradition credits the chief Līloa with building Pakaʻalana, a great temple at the valley mouth, in the 15th century.
12 Watkins Glen State Park
United States · 32.3 km from Elmira42.377° N 76.872° W
Flickr user: Peter Rivera Stamford, Connecticut https://www.flickr.com/people/riverap1/ · CC BY 2.0 The Gorge Trail is the reason to come. It follows the creek through the full length of the glen with more than 800 stone steps, crossing and recrossing the water on bridges and passing behind Cavern Cascade, where the path runs under the fall's overhang. Further up, Rainbow Falls spills from the side wall across the trail, and a stone bridge spans the gorge above it; in the Spiral Gorge section the canyon tightens into a twisting cleft. The stonework is part of the beauty.
Did you know? The race was the idea of Cameron Argetsinger, a Cornell law student, and after a spectator died in 1952 it moved to a purpose-built closed circuit.
13 Fern Canyon
United States41.403° N 124.068° W
NPS Photo · Public domain Several native species make up the living walls, among them five-finger maidenhair fern, deer fern, California polypody, licorice fern and western sword fern. Seep monkeyflower and redwood sorrel grow alongside them, American dippers feed in the creek, and Roosevelt elk are sometimes seen near the canyon mouth. A half-mile loop trail follows the creek up the canyon floor and links at one end with the James Irvine Trail.
Did you know? The canyon was carved by Home Creek cutting through the soft conglomerate that forms the coastal bluffs.
14 Santa Elena Canyon
United States29.165° N 103.612° W
Image by Goodfreephotos_com from Pixabay Across the Big Bend region, the Rio Grande has sliced through three uplifts made mostly of limestone, carving canyons with nearly vertical walls; Santa Elena, Mariscal and Boquillas are the best known, and Santa Elena has the tallest cliffs of all. The limestones date largely from the Cretaceous period, and one of the local formations is named the Santa Elena Limestone. The river reached the Big Bend country roughly two million years ago, and the canyons record the erosion and downcutting that followed. Inside the gorge, about 2 miles from the upstream entrance, lies a rapid known as the Rock Slide.
Did you know? Inside Santa Elena, Hill's party had to drag their boats over the boulder choke of the Rock Slide, taking three days to cover about seven miles.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful canyons and gorges in North America?
- On our list, Grand Canyon (United States) ranks first, followed by Horseshoe Bend (United States) and Sumidero Canyon (Mexico).
- Which country has the most canyons and gorges in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (12) and Mexico (2).
- How was the Grand Canyon formed?
- The Colorado River cut down through the rock layers of the Colorado Plateau as the plateau was being uplifted, over several million years. Side streams, rain and freeze-thaw erosion then widened the canyon.
- How do slot canyons like Antelope Canyon form?
- Slot canyons are carved by flash floods that rush through narrow cracks in soft sandstone. Over time the water and the sand it carries scour the rock into deep, narrow passages with smooth, curving walls.
- Is Copper Canyon bigger than the Grand Canyon?
- Copper Canyon is a system of several canyons, and taken together it is larger in area than the Grand Canyon, with some sections deeper as well.
- How many canyons and gorges are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 14 canyons and gorges in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 12.