Black Canyon of the Gunnison, CO

We drove from Lafayette to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park through absolutely gorgeous mountains. I had not been over Monarch Pass and through Gunnison since shortly after the accident that killed Andrew. I spent a freezing night in the Black Canyon with some Reed friends on our way home to the mid-west in 1971. This time it was bright and sunny. We got there about 4 in the afternoon and were the only people in the camp ground. We drove down to the Visitor Center to see if we could find a map and saw a bicyclist. When we talked to him, it turned out he had biked up only to discover there was no water available in the park. All the water in the park is trucked in from Montrose, 15 miles away, and since the weather is now below freezing, there is no water. We told him that we could give him a gallon of water if he came by our trailer. He showed up while we were fixing dinner and we invited him to squeeze in with us. Wayne, an Australian by way of England, is a serious long-distance biker. He started in San Francisco and biked all the way up to the Arctic Circle in Alaska and is on his way down to Argentina. The total trip will take about 2 years. While on the trip he met a sweety, a nurse-midwife from Switzerland.

The next morning we got up and walked along the Rim Trail to the Visitor Center, around the Oak Flats loop (which wasn't flat, though it went down to an oak savannah below the rim of the canyon) and back to the camp ground. We took Darwin along (illegally on the last two trails).

Black Canyon of the Gunnison is carved by the Gunnison River which drops nearly 95 feet per mile. Before the three dams were built upsteam, the scouring power of the river carved the canyon over 2 million years. It is quite narrow, in one place only a quarter mile wide. The walls are more eroded on the south side because they face north and the freezing/thawing effect is greater. The canyon is almost 2000' deep at its deepest. Though you can hear the river, it is muted.

The river wasn't fully mapped until about 1910 when two guys went through with rubber air mattresses trying to figure out where to build a tunnel to divert some of the water into the Uncompagre Valley near Montrose for irrigation purposes.

Part of the reason the canyon is so spectacular is these reddish intrusions, pegmatite, which occurred during the volcanic era about 60 million years ago. It's much harder than the volcanic material and so the walls sheer away in thin spires. We drove along the rim road, stopping at various overlooks. It is a really spectacular place and we were almost alone in it. We finally left about 2 in the afternoon, headed for Ouray, and the beginning of the Million Dollar Highway.