Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park — canyon
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Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

  • 2 min read
  • 38.580° N 107.728° W
  • Dark Sky Place

Interesting facts

  • In the deepest, narrowest stretches of the canyon, direct sunlight reaches the river for only about 33 minutes a day.
  • 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.
  • Twenty-six workers died building the Gunnison Tunnel, and President William Howard Taft travelled to Colorado to dedicate it in September 1909.
  • The first full passage of the inner canyon came in August 1901, when Torrence and Fellows spent ten days working through about 30 miles of rapids and boulders.
  • Even through this hard metamorphic rock, the Gunnison River keeps cutting down at roughly an inch every hundred years.
  • In 1882 the Denver & Rio Grande pushed narrow-gauge track into the upper canyon at a cost of about $165,000 per mile, an enormous sum for the time.
  • A railroad survey party spent 68 days in the inner canyon in the winter of 1882, trying to judge whether trains could follow the river all the way through.
  • The river and the canyon take their name from Captain John W. Gunnison, who surveyed the region for a transcontinental railroad route in 1853.
  • The winding North Rim Road was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1933 and 1935, right after the canyon became a national monument.
  • More than half of the park, about 15,600 acres, was set aside as designated wilderness in 1976.

Why it is worth it

Few canyons in North America combine such depth with such narrowness. In western Colorado the Gunnison River has sawn straight down through some of the oldest rock on the continent, leaving a gorge that reaches 2,722 feet (829 m) deep at Warner Point but narrows to only about 40 feet (12 m) at river level in the Narrows. The walls are so steep and close that parts of the inner canyon see sunlight only briefly each day, and from the rim the depths look dark even at noon — which is where the Black Canyon gets its name.

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.

The Gunnison drops steeply here, averaging around 43 feet per mile across the canyon and far more at its steepest point near Chasm View, which makes it one of the steepest descents of any major river in North America. Protected as a national monument in 1933 and redesignated a national park in 1999, the canyon is seen above all from its rims. The South Rim road runs past a string of overlooks — Gunnison Point, Chasm View, the Painted Wall view and others — each a few steps from the car and each dropping away into shadow. The quieter North Rim, reached by a partly unpaved road, looks straight across the Narrows.

For the bold, the inner canyon can be reached by steep, unmaintained routes that are serious undertakings, while the paved East Portal Road, with a 16 percent grade, descends to the river at the canyon's upstream end. Sunrise and late evening, when light slides briefly down the walls, are the moments to stand at the edge.

Getting there

The South Rim is about 14 miles (22 km) from Montrose: take U.S. Highway 50 east, then Colorado Highway 347 north for 7 miles to the entrance. The North Rim lies 11 miles southwest of Crawford via Highway 92 and Black Canyon Road, the last 7 miles unpaved, and is closed to vehicles in winter. There is no bridge between the rims; driving from one to the other takes two to three hours. Montrose Regional Airport (MTJ) is about 16 km from the park and is the closest airport to the South Rim.

On these lists

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From the encyclopaedia

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park is a national park of the United States located in western Colorado and managed by the National Park Service. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison was established as a national monument on March 2, 1933. It was redesignated a national park on October 21, 1999, and incorporated 4,000 acres owned by the Bureau of Land Management. The Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area was created at the same time. There are two primary entrances to the park: the south rim entrance is located 15 miles (24 km) east of Montrose, while the north rim entrance is 11 miles (18 km) south of Crawford and is closed in the winter. The park contains 12 miles (19 km) of the 48-mile-long (77 km) Gunnison River. The national park itself contains the deepest and most dramatic section of the canyon, but the canyon continues upstream into Curecanti National Recreation Area and downstream into Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area. The canyon's name owes itself to the fact that parts of the gorge only receive 33 minutes of sunlight a day, according to Images of America: The Black Canyon of the Gunnison. In the book, author Duane Vandenbusche states, "Several canyons of the American West are longer and some are deeper, but none combines the depth, sheerness, narrowness, darkness, and dread of the Black Canyon."

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