The Utah Canoeing Trip – Day 12, Black Canyon of the Gunnison

When I woke up all I could say was wow, I want to hang out and enjoy this place for a while. I knew better things lay ahead at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park though so I made pancakes for breakfast and forged on.

 

 

On the way out I stopped by Morrow Point Dam, 469′ tall, 740′ long, 52′ wide at the base and 12′ wide at the top

 

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Pictures and words won’t do justice to this place. The basic uniqueness is the depth (2000′) vs. the width (~2 miles). Compare this to the Grand Canyon at 4000′ average vs. 20 miles. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long vs 48 miles for the Black. The narrowest part is only 40′ across and must have been a site when the river was flowing freely after a large rain. The first picture below gives a sense of the width vs. depth. The canyon was carved by the Gunnison river over a relatively short 2 million years (compared to 6 million for the Grand Canyon). The force of the river comes from the incredibly fast elevation drop which averages almost 100′ per mile in the park itself. This compares to 0.5’/mi for the Mississippi and something like 35’/mi for the Colorado if my memory serves me.

This great force from the river, especially during the rain storms that are present during the summer, has a massive erosion effect on the terrain. The rim doesn’t suffer much erosion due to the hard rock (primarily gneiss) where the Grand Canyon has a much softer sandstone type of material that erodes more readily. That’s simplified explanation but makes the point.

I took over 100 pictures during my day there and it was hard to downselect to just a few but the couple below are my favorites.

 

Juniper is the tree of choice for this terrain. The Juniper is an incredibly tough tree, surviving in a very unfriendly environment, I came across the gigantic example pictured below which is a few hundred years old. The tree grows seed cones on a 2 year schedule which are a valuable source of nutrition for local wildlife. There are other examples that date to 800 years old but I liked this one best.

 

 

After a very late lunch I hit the road to see if I could make Arches soon enough before dark to see the highlights. See you in the next post!