Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park - Colorado

Established October 21, 1999

30,385 acres

The view from Dragon Point on the South Rim Drive

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, formerly known as a National Monument, became America's 55th National Park on October 23, 1999. Open all year with snow-shoeing and cross country skiing in winter, and fishing, hiking, nature walks, camping and campfire programs in the summer.

The canyon's name comes from the fact that so little sunlight can penetrate; it's eternal shadows keep plant growth inside the canyon scarce.

Sheer walls of dark gray stone rise more than 2,600 feet above the swift and turbulent Gunnison River to create one of the most dramatic canyons in the country. Deeper than it is wide in some places, this great slit in the earth is so narrow that sunlight penetrates to the bottom only at midday. The park protects the deepest, most thrilling 14 miles of the gorge, about 75 miles upstream of the Gunnison's junction with the Colorado River.

Imagine chiseling two parallel walls of hard gneiss and schist running the length of Manhattan and standing as high as the two World Trade Centers stacked atop each other, with water as your only tool. At the inconceivable rate of one inch per century, it would take all of human history just to cut through five feet of rock. What you see from the rim is the product of two million years of patient work.

The metamorphic rocks exposed at the bottom of the canyon are nearly two billion years old, dating from the Precambrian or oldest era of the Earth. Here and there are swirling pink veins of igneous pegmatite, shooting through the walls and livening up the canyon's somber appearance.

The Painted Wall on the South Rim Drive

Indians and white explorers generally avoided the formidable canyon up through the 19th century. In 1900, five men attempted to run the river in wooden boats to survey it as a possible source of irrigation for the Uncompahgre Valley. After a month, with their boats in splinters and their supplies gone, they gave up. But the next year two men ran it in nine days on rubber air mattresses. A water diversion tunnel was soon in the works; the four-year project, completed in 1909, resulted in a 6-mile-long tunnel through rock, clay, and sand. The labor was so grueling and dangerous that the average period of employment was only two weeks.

Today, three dams upstream have further tamed the Gunnison, but the canyon and its section of river remain wild.

Rim drives and hikes offer plenty of opportunities for peering into the magnificent canyon and marveling at its cliffs and towers of stone. Ravens, golden eagles, and peregrine falcons soar the great gulf of air out in front. On top grows a thick forest of Gambel oaks and serviceberry, which provide cover for mule deer and black bear, while farther down the canyon Douglas-firs thrive in the shade, and cottonwoods and box elders find footholds along the river.

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