Grand Canyon National Park — national park
Image by Filio from Pixabay

Grand Canyon National Park

  • 2 min read
  • 36.055° N 112.122° W
  • UNESCO World Heritage
  • UNESCO natural beauty
  • Dark Sky Place

Interesting facts

  • The canyon's rocks span almost two billion years, from the Vishnu Schist in the Inner Gorge to the 270-million-year-old Kaibab Limestone on the rim.
  • Within the layers lies the Great Unconformity, a gap where about 500 million years of rock record is simply missing.
  • The canyon is about 446 km long, up to 29 km wide and more than 1.8 km deep.
  • In 1540 Spanish soldiers guided by Hopi people tried to reach the river, got a third of the way down and reported rocks bigger than Seville's Giralda tower.
  • John Wesley Powell led the first expedition down the river in 1869, and he is credited with popularising the name Grand Canyon instead of Big Canyon.
  • The park spans five of North America's seven life zones, a climate range comparable to travelling from Mexico to Canada.
  • The North Rim stands more than 300 metres higher than the South Rim, so its side canyons are longer and deeper than those on the south.
  • The canyon acts as a genetic barrier for tassel-eared squirrels, separating populations on the two rims.
  • The log-built Grand Canyon Depot of 1910 is one of only three surviving log-cabin railway stations of the fourteen once built in the United States.
  • Mary Colter's Desert View Watchtower is about 21 metres tall, and its top marks the highest point on the South Rim.

Why it is worth it

Grand Canyon National Park protects a chasm that the Colorado River and its tributaries cut into the Colorado Plateau after the plateau was lifted. The walls expose a staircase of coloured rock reaching back to Precambrian time, so that every viewpoint is also a cross-section through geological history — reds, buffs and greys banding the cliffs, and the river a thin line far below. The park was designated a World Heritage Site in 1979 and draws close to five million visitors a year.

Protection came slowly. Benjamin Harrison introduced the first bill for a national park here in 1882 and failed three times; as president he made the area a forest reserve in 1893. Theodore Roosevelt, who visited in 1903 and urged Americans to leave the canyon as it was, declared a national monument in 1908. Only on 26 February 1919 did Woodrow Wilson sign the act creating the national park, the fifteenth in the country. In 1975 it was enlarged to take in Marble Canyon and a second monument to the west, and its status helped defeat proposals to dam the river inside its boundaries.

Most people see the canyon from the South Rim, where the rim road and the paved Rim Trail string together viewpoints such as Mather, Hopi and Mohave Points. The South Rim also holds a remarkable group of early park architecture. Mary Colter designed Hermit's Rest and Lookout Studio (both 1914), Bright Angel Lodge (1935), whose stone fireplace repeats the canyon's rock layers in order, and the Desert View Watchtower of 1932 at the eastern end, modelled on Ancestral Puebloan towers and offering one of the few views down to the river. El Tovar Hotel, built for the Santa Fe Railway in 1905, and the Kolb brothers' photographic studio of 1904, perched above the Bright Angel Trail, complete the picture. The North Rim, on the higher Kaibab Plateau, is quieter, with viewpoints at Point Imperial and Cape Royal; in the far west, the Toroweap Overlook is reached only on long unpaved roads.

Getting there

Most visitors arrive at the South Rim on Arizona State Route 64, which leaves Interstate 40 and enters the park at the South Entrance near Tusayan; Flagstaff, the nearest large city, is about 100 km away in a straight line. The historic Grand Canyon Railway runs from Williams to a log-built depot of 1910 in Grand Canyon Village. Grand Canyon National Park Airport (GCN) is about 12 km from the rim; a free park shuttle serves Hermit Road for most of the year.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Arizona 18The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States 7The Most Beautiful National Parks in the United States 9The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries in the United States 12The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in the United States 25The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed National Parks 27The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Nature Sanctuaries 43The Most Beautiful National Parks 61The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests 61The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty 77The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries 91The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

Grand Canyon National Park is a national park of the United States located in northwestern Arizona, the 15th site to have been named as a national park. The park's central feature is the Grand Canyon, a gorge of the Colorado River, which is often considered one of the Wonders of the World. The park, which covers 1,217,262 acres of unincorporated area in Coconino and Mohave counties, received more than 4.9 million recreational visitors in 2024. The Grand Canyon was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979. The park celebrated its 100th anniversary on February 26, 2019.

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36.05530, -112.12200per Wikidata