Laura’s Journal: Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Posted on by snukes
Fun fact: the Black Canyon is not named “black” for the color of the rock, but because there are places at the bottom where the sun shines for less than 30 minutes a day, even in the summer.
Painted Wall. (Another fun fact: it is composed of black schist painted with pink pegmatite.)
Warner Nature Trail. We’re walking on the huge rock outcropping you can see better just past me here. Off the side of the rock to the left is a valley. Off the side (which you can’t see) to the right is the 2000-foot-deep canyon. It’s cool.
Valleys and dunes and mountains. Everywhere is mountains here.
The sun came out today exactly long enough to ruin every selfie we tried to take.

Monday, May 10, 2021
BLACK CANYON OF THE GUNNISON NATIONAL PARK

Hello, Colorado! How much more like home you feel. I’ve missed my granites and pine trees. I do love to explore, but I will always be a mountain girl at heart.

What a beautiful, baffling canyon! At its deepest only half as deep as the Grand Canyon, the Black Canyon is striking less for its proportions than for its uniformity of dark rock and for the way the walls of the canyon not only rise from the river, but also from the landscape to the south. A fascinating combination of volcanic activity and erosion resulted in a landscape where, approaching from the south, you gain a solid thousand feet of elevation in order to reach the rim of a canyon with a 2,000-foot drop to the river. It’s really cool. Warner Point is a great place to observe this geologic wackiness. With each new corner you come around, you get an alternating view of the drop into the canyon on one side, or the drop into a fertile green valley on the other.

Again, after a fairly big-mile day in Arches, we found ourselves lagging a bit. There had been some discussion of hiking to the bottom – an activity that in this canyon is more climb/scramble than hike; one route descends 2,000 feet in one unmarked mile – but an intermittent drizzle and lack of permits available on the easiest of the routes (1,800 feet down in 1.5 miles) convinced us to save that adventure for the next trip. Instead we took the Oak Flat Loop Trail down 400 feet for a little taste. It was just right for my energy levels.

To my great disappointment, the East Portal road that lets one drive to the bottom of the canyon down a crazy road doesn’t open until next week. Yet another thing to put down for next time. I’d also love to watch people climbing on these mad-sheer walls.

We spotted a few patches of snow still on the ground on the Oak Flats trail. We’ve really gone through nearly every imaginable kind of weather on this trip. New snow is supposedly falling over Great Sand Dunes NP tonight. We’ve decided to give that an extra day to dry out while we have a bit of a rest and get some laundry done in Salida tomorrow.

[Diagram Caption] I love this diagram for the dinosaurs. When we were in the Grand Canyon, I joked that I’d spotted the K/T Boundary (a layer of ash marking the end of the dinosaurs) but I was hilariously wrong. The Grand Canyon is literal eons older than the dinosaurs. So, technically, is the Black Canyon, but at least here there are some dino layers in the hills nearby.

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