Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is not the deepest gorge on Earth, but few landscapes expose so much of the planet's history in a single view. The Colorado River has cut through the rising Colorado Plateau for 446 km, opening a chasm up to 29 km wide and more than 1.8 km deep. At the bottom lies the Vishnu Schist, around two billion years old; at the rim, the Kaibab Limestone, laid down some 270 million years ago. In between, the walls are banded in reds, creams and greys, and between some of the layers there are gaps of hundreds of millions of years that geologists call the Great Unconformity.

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. The canyon became a national monument in 1908 and a national park in 1919; today it draws around five million visitors a year.

About nine in ten visitors go to the South Rim, open all year at around 2,100 metres. Grand Canyon Village has the historic hotels, two visitor centres, a geology museum and the start of the main trails into the canyon; free park shuttle buses link the viewpoints along the rim, and further east stands the Desert View Watchtower. The North Rim, about 300 metres higher and wetter, with spruce and fir forest, is reached by a separate long road that normally opens only from mid-May to mid-October; check its status before planning. West of the national park, on the Hualapai reservation, Grand Canyon West has the glass-floored Skywalk, opened in 2007, about 125 miles by road from Las Vegas.

Walking below the rim is the best way to feel the canyon's scale, but it is also where visitors get into trouble. Temperatures at the river often pass 38°C in summer, while the rims can be snowbound in winter. Park rangers advise against hiking to the river and back in one day, and every year people have to be rescued. Any overnight stay below the rim requires a backcountry permit, and demand far exceeds supply. Mule trips and multi-day rafting trips on the Colorado are the other classic ways down.

Getting there

Grand Canyon Village lies about 180 miles (290 km) north of Phoenix and 168 miles (270 km) from Las Vegas; the nearest city is Flagstaff, roughly 108 km away in a straight line, with a scheduled shuttle to the village. The nearest airport is Grand Canyon National Park Airport (GCN), about 17 km from the village and a base for scenic flights; most travellers fly into Phoenix or Las Vegas and drive. The Grand Canyon Railway runs daily heritage trains on the 64-mile line from Williams to the South Rim.