Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Nobody talks about this one, and I cannot understand why. Lia and I had come off the crowds of the more famous Colorado parks expecting something modest, a pleasant gorge, a photo, a sandwich. Then we walked out to the first overlook on the South Rim and the ground simply fell away in front of us, straight down into a slot so deep and so dark that the river at the bottom was a thin silver thread you could barely hear. I have stood at the Grand Canyon. This is narrower, steeper, more vertiginous, more intimate in its menace. My whole body understood the drop before my mind caught up.

The South Rim Overlooks

The South Rim road strings together a dozen overlooks, and each one gives you a different angle on the same astonishing fact of depth. At Gunnison Point the walls are so close together and so sheer that the canyon feels less like scenery than like a wound in the earth. We took our time, walking the short spurs out to each railing, and I noticed I gripped every one of them. At Chasm View the opposite wall stood close enough to shout across, streaked with pale bands of pegmatite like veins in the dark rock. Lia, braver than me, leaned right out; I hung back and called her reckless, which she enjoyed.

Painted Wall

The single sight I keep returning to in memory is the Painted Wall, the tallest cliff in Colorado, over five hundred meters of sheer stone laced with light streaks of intruded rock that look, exactly, as though a giant dragged pale paint down the face in long careless strokes. From the overlook you cannot photograph its true scale; there is nothing to give it away, no tree or building, just wall and more wall. Lia and I sat on the rocks for a long while trying to make our eyes accept how big it was. A pair of white-throated swifts shot past below us, and even they looked tiny against it.

Down to the River

You cannot casually hike into this canyon; the routes to the river are unmarked, brutally steep scrambles down loose gullies that the rangers make you get a permit for and warn you about seriously. We had neither the time nor, honestly, the nerve for the full descent, but we did take the short steep drop toward the river on the Oak Flat Trail until the walls closed overhead and the temperature fell and the roar of the Gunnison came up loud from below. Standing in that cool half-dark, hemmed in by rock a mile of geologic time thick, I felt genuinely small in the good way that the best wild places make you feel. Then we climbed, gasping, back into the light.

Getting There

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park sits in western Colorado, with its popular South Rim about a fifteen-minute drive from the town of Montrose off US-50. Denver is roughly five hours east; Grand Junction about an hour and a half. The South Rim road is open in full only from spring through autumn and closes with winter snow, so check conditions. Any hike to the river requires a free wilderness permit and real fitness, but you do not need to descend at all to be floored by the place. The overlooks alone are among the most humbling I have ever leaned over.