Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Spent the night in a fantastic state park about 30 miles south of Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.  We were all up first thing and headed to the Canyon for a guided ranger tour.  I freely admit that I knew little about this National Park so was excited to have a ranger available for questions.  Turns out, I knew even less than I thought.  Although the canyon was “discovered” in the mid 1800’s, it would be more than 50 years before anyone figured out how to get to the bottom and actually navigate the Gunnison river that had carved the canyon.  The main driver – survey the entire region to see if it would be possible to carve a tunnel from the river over to the nearby town of Montrose.  In 1901 they succeeded and in 1905 the tunnel started.  Nearly six miles through solid rock.  And since this is still in the early days of dynamite, although they used some, it was mainly picks, shovels and nitroglycerine (can you say, one slip and goodbye….).  Once the tunnel was finished the Uncompahgre valley (don’t worry, we can’t pronounce it either), became good farmland and more people started coming.  They were enamored with the sheer scale of the canyon and eventually petitioned for it to be protected.  It became a National Monument and then later, a National Park.

The scale and steepness is amazing.  Almost to the point of vertigo.  Pictures simply do not do it justice.  It is over 5000 feet to the bottom!  The best way I can think of to give you an idea is to say – they are NO trails.  You simply do not hike this canyon.  You can walk around the rim.  And there are some areas to get down to the bottom, but they all come with big warnings about narrow ledges, rockslides and long drops to the bottom.  Not my idea of a good hike, unless I have ropes and harnesses.  So we stayed at the top and just looked down.

A day in the park and back to our beautiful campsite!  If you zoom in a bit you can see “Moby” about halfway between the mountains and the lake on the left side.  :-

It is a hard to get to National Park, but amazing to see and well worth the visit.  Truly a wonder of nature.