48 Fun Facts About Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Black Canyon of the Gunnison lies in which region of Colorado?

The park sits on Colorado's Western Slope, the side of the state west of the Continental Divide, where the Gunnison River runs toward its meeting with the Colorado River.

Why is the canyon called 'Black'?

Parts of the gorge get only 33 minutes of sun a day, so the walls sit in shadow and look black.

Per one park history, how many minutes of sunlight do the darkest parts of the gorge get each day?

The darkest stretches of the gorge get only about 33 minutes of direct sunlight a day, because the walls are so sheer and the canyon so narrow for its depth.

How wide is the canyon at its narrowest point down at the river?

The canyon narrows to just 40 feet at river level at The Narrows; even the tightest rim-to-rim gap in the park is about 1,100 feet.

What is the canyon's greatest depth, measured at Warner Point?

The canyon is deepest at Warner Point, where it drops 2,722 feet from rim to river; at The Narrows it is 1,725 feet deep.

The Painted Wall, the tallest cliff in Colorado, rises how far from river to rim?

The Painted Wall rises 2,250 feet from the river to the rim, nearly twice the 1,250-foot height of the Empire State Building.

The light-coloured stripes across the Painted Wall are made of which coarse-grained igneous rock?

The stripes are pegmatite dikes, veins of large quartz, feldspar and mica crystals that intruded the dark gneiss and, being harder, stand out in relief.

How old are the gneiss and schist that make up most of the canyon walls?

The gneiss and schist are about 1.7 billion years old, metamorphosed under heat and pressure when volcanic island arcs collided with the southern edge of the ancient continent.

At what rate did the Gunnison River carve down through the hard Precambrian rock?

Confined in hard Precambrian gneiss and unable to shift course, the sediment-laden Gunnison ground straight down at only about an inch every 100 years.

How does the Gunnison's 34 ft-per-mile drop compare with the Colorado's in the Grand Canyon?

The Colorado falls only about 7.5 feet per mile through the Grand Canyon, so the Gunnison's 34 feet per mile is roughly four to five times steeper.

Where in the park does the river make its steepest plunge, 240 feet per mile?

At Chasm View the Gunnison drops 240 feet per mile, its steepest stretch; through the whole canyon it averages 34 feet per mile.

The Gunnison, one of the Colorado River's largest tributaries, joins it at which city?

The Gunnison meets the Colorado at Grand Junction, the city named for that junction; in 1776 Spanish explorers had called the Gunnison the Río de San Javier.

How long is the whole Black Canyon, from Curecanti downstream to the Gunnison Gorge?

The Black Canyon runs 48 miles in all; the park protects its deepest section, with the gorge continuing upstream into Curecanti National Recreation Area and downstream into the Gunnison Gorge.

Which Native people knew the canyon long before Europeans and are said to have avoided it out of superstition?

The Ute knew the rims for centuries but, by tradition, avoided the gorge itself out of superstition; they called the river 'much rocks, big water'.

Captain John Williams Gunnison first described the canyon in 1853 while surveying what?

Gunnison led one of the 1853 Pacific Railroad Surveys, seeking a railroad route to the Pacific along the 38th parallel; he found the gorge impassable and detoured south toward the Uncompahgre Valley.

What happened to Captain Gunnison later in 1853?

A band of Pahvant Ute attacked his party near Sevier Lake, killing him and seven others; the river and the town of Gunnison were named in his honour.

Which railroad ran the first passenger train through the canyon on 13 August 1882?

The Denver and Rio Grande, William Jackson Palmer's narrow-gauge line, reached Gunnison in 1881 and pushed its tracks through the canyon to Cimarron the following year.

Carving the 15-mile railroad bed from Sapinero to Cimarron reportedly cost how much per mile?

The Sapinero–Cimarron stretch cost a reported $165,000 a mile, blasted out of the gorge by Irish and Italian crews over more than a year.

How many days did Byron Bryant's 1882–83 inner-canyon survey take, expected to need 20?

Byron Bryant's survey took 68 days instead of the planned 20; most of his crew quit in terror within days, and he reported the canyon impenetrable for a railroad.

Which famous writer called his 1889 train ride through the gorge 'the mad ride'?

Rudyard Kipling rode the narrow-gauge line through the gorge in 1889 and wrote in From Sea to Sea of 'the mad ride', on track seemingly built by 'dropping miscellaneous dirt into the river'.

What were Abraham Lincoln Fellows and William Torrence seeking on the canyon's first recorded descent in 1901?

They were scouting a site for a water-diversion tunnel to the dry Uncompahgre Valley; after days in the gorge, swimming the river repeatedly, they found the spot that became the Gunnison Tunnel's intake.

What did the 1901 explorers use instead of the wooden boats that had doomed a 1900 attempt?

Their multi-chambered rubber raft, an inflatable ringed by a lifeline, floated their 35-pound packs through the rapids that had wrecked the wooden boats of the 1900 attempt.

How long is the Gunnison Tunnel, completed in 1909 to carry river water to the Uncompahgre Valley?

The Gunnison Tunnel runs 5.8 miles, about 30,600 feet, from the East Portal in the canyon to the Uncompahgre Valley, opened in 1909 after four years of work.

Which president dedicated the Gunnison Tunnel on 23 September 1909?

President William Howard Taft dedicated the tunnel in person on 23 September 1909, in the first year of his presidency, sending the first Gunnison water toward the Uncompahgre Valley.

How many workers died building the tunnel over its four years?

26 workers died during the four-year bore, in heat, flooding, carbon dioxide and a fractured fault zone where 2,000 feet of water-filled rock took almost a year.

In which year was Black Canyon of the Gunnison first protected as a national monument?

Herbert Hoover proclaimed Black Canyon of the Gunnison a national monument on 2 March 1933, two days before leaving office.

In which year did it become a national park?

Congress upgraded the monument to a national park in October 1999, with the same act creating the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area downstream.

Which New Deal agency built the North Rim Road and its overlooks in the mid-1930s?

The Civilian Conservation Corps built the five-mile North Rim Road and its five overlooks in the mid-1930s; the road is on the National Register of Historic Places.

About what fraction of the park's area is designated wilderness?

About half: the Black Canyon of the Gunnison Wilderness covers 15,599 acres of the roughly 30,750-acre park, first designated in 1976 and enlarged when the park was created in 1999.

Which nearby town, 15 miles west of the south rim entrance, is the park's main gateway?

Montrose, about 15 miles west of the South Rim entrance, is the park's gateway town; the turnoff from US Highway 50 onto Colorado 347 leads up to the rim.

The East Portal Road down to the river has what maximum grade, which bars vehicles over 22 feet long?

East Portal Road drops to the river at grades of up to 16 percent, so vehicles and trailers over 22 feet are barred; it ends at the diversion dam that feeds the Gunnison Tunnel.

The unmaintained inner-canyon descents are called what?

The park calls them routes on the South Rim and draws on the North Rim: unmarked Class 3 scrambles thick with poison ivy, taking hours each way, for which hikers need a wilderness permit.

What must anglers on the park's Gold Medal stretch do with any rainbow trout they catch?

Every rainbow trout must be released at once to protect the wild stock; only a limited catch of brown trout may be kept on this Gold Medal stretch.

Which reservoir upstream, created by a 1966 dam, is Colorado's largest body of water?

Blue Mesa Reservoir, behind the dam finished in 1966, is Colorado's largest body of water: 20 miles long with 96 miles of shoreline, and the largest kokanee salmon fishery in the United States.

Curecanti National Recreation Area, upstream of the park, is named after what?

Curecanti takes its name from a 19th-century Ute sub-chief of that name; the recreation area, set up in 1965, covers three Bureau of Reclamation reservoirs on the upper Gunnison.

Which small songbird that walks underwater to feed lives along the river in the canyon?

The American dipper, a stocky grey songbird, walks and swims underwater in the fast Gunnison to pick insect larvae off the streambed; peregrine falcons and white-throated swifts work the walls above.

Black Canyon gilia, a rare wildflower native to the park, belongs to which plant family?

Black Canyon gilia (Aliciella penstemonoides) is a member of the phlox family, Polemoniaceae; it grows on the rocky rims among pinyon, juniper and Gambel oak.

Which science-fiction author based the city in her 1967 novel City of Illusions on the canyon?

Ursula K. Le Guin set Es Toch, the Shing city of City of Illusions (1967), on the brink of a great canyon modelled on the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

Which bluegrass band's 2017 song '1901: A Canyon Odyssey' retells the Fellows–Torrence descent?

The Infamous Stringdusters put '1901: A Canyon Odyssey' on their 2017 album Laws of Gravity, which won the Grammy for best bluegrass album, retelling the raft trip through the gorge.

How many people visited the park in an average year between 2007 and 2016?

The park averaged about 190,000 visitors a year over 2007–2016, making it one of the quieter national parks; most visitors drive the South Rim road and peer over the edge.

What tackle are anglers restricted to on the Gold Medal stretch of river inside the park?

Only artificial flies and lures may be used on the Gold Medal stretch, which runs from below Crystal Dam downstream through the park to the North Fork confluence.

When it opened in 1909, the Gunnison Tunnel held what world record?

It quickly turned the arid Uncompahgre Valley around Montrose into profitable farmland and became a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1972.

The park's North Rim entrance, closed in winter, lies 11 miles south of which town?

The North Rim is reached from Crawford, 11 miles to the north, by Colorado 92 and a gravel road; the road closes to vehicles in winter.

On most maps of the 1850s and 1860s, the Gunnison was known by what name?

Maps of the 1850s and 1860s labelled today's Gunnison the Grand River; it was later renamed for Captain John W. Gunnison, the Army topographer killed by Pahvant Ute in Utah in 1853.

Irrigation of soils derived from the Mancos Shale contaminates the Gunnison River with which element?

Selenium leaches from irrigated Mancos Shale soils into the lower Gunnison, where it threatens endangered native fish such as the razorback sucker and Colorado pikeminnow.

According to local lore, how did prospector Frank Lauzon get the idea for the Gunnison Tunnel?

Lauzon claimed the idea came to him in a dream in the early 1890s while farming near the canyon; the federal Reclamation Service finally built the tunnel between 1905 and 1909.

The canyon's Precambrian walls were raised during which mountain-building event 70 to 40 million years ago?

The Laramide orogeny, 70 to 40 million years ago, lifted the Precambrian basement as the Gunnison Uplift; volcanic ash from 35 to 26 million years ago then buried the area before the river cut down.

Who was the first non-native to record the Gunnison River, reaching it in 1765?

Juan Maria de Rivera's 1765 expedition from Santa Fe reached the Gunnison near its Uncompahgre confluence, close to today's Delta; Domínguez and Escalante followed in 1776.