Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

    The Black Canyon of the Gunnison has only been a national park since 1999 so don’t be surprised if you have never heard of it.   When I planned this trip I looked at the National Park Service map for Colorado to see if there were interesting spots that I had not added to our itinerary, and I found this beautiful park.

    We went to the Visitor Center and watched a video which gave us the history of the area.   The canyon is so deep and so sheer that it was not explored by the Spanish nor inhabited by the Ute Indians in the early days.  However, the Uncompahgre Valley below river was very dry and by 1900 citizens of the area decided to figure out how to divert some of the water from the Gunnison River to the broad valley where they were ranching and farming.  Explorers went down the fast and narrow river on a rubber mattress and worked out where to put a diversion tunnel which was dug in 1909 and is still used.  Today the park service discourages all rafters and kayakers from going down this part of the river because it is so dangerous.

    We drove along the South Rim of the park and looked down into a very narrow, and very deep canyon.  As it goes through the 48 miles of the park the river loses more elevation than the Mississippi does from Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico.  At one point the canyon is so deep that two Empire State Buildings could stand on top of each other in the canyon.  Despite the steep walls, dangerous rapids and sheer cliffs, we saw several guys standing on a rock fishing deep in the canyon.  We never figured out how they got down there, but a fisherman that we met later in the day told us that there are trails down into the canyon.  Yikes!  However, if there is one thing that we have learned on our travels it is that you have to be here to really "see" how very deep this canyon is.  No photograph can give you the perspective of looking so far down to where the thundering Gunnison River flows between the black walls of the canyon.

   For our afternoon adventure we drove to the “East Portal” of the park down a road with a 16% grade.  We drove the little Honda CRV around rock falls and down the perilously steep and twisty road.  We were in first gear most of the way down and still needed the brakes.  Once at the bottom we found a lot of fly fishers, a campground, a dam, and the entry to the diversion tunnel.   It was really fascinating to see an engineering feat from the early 1900’s still in use.