Black Canyon National Park

Tuesday 21^st April

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A lovely sunny day greeted us as we set off early for our next stop. Originally we were traveling to Gunnison, but had heard from our ranger about Black Canyon National Park, which was a mere 5 mile off our route, so we endeavoured to go and have a look, So tempted were we that we decided to stay the night in the campground, no water, but electric hook-up for $9.00 per night. Black Canyon NPS website had said that it did not, except for one site on B loop that was ADA, yet on arriving we found that not it was not only the ADA site that had electricity, all of B loop was open, hooked up and empty. Fortunate really as the ADA site was very small, ADA may as well have stood for American Dwarf Adapted.
Once we had set up camp we set off to explore The Black Canyon

First stop was the Visitor Centre, where we watched a very interesting video, then sat in the sunshine and ate our lunch, before tackling the Black Canyon.

Unfortunately words fail us yet again and we are stuck with the old superlatives of awesome and stupendous and magnificent, because this truly was all of those things. It was a canyon gouged out of the mountain range by the Gunnison River, straight down from rim to river over 2000ft. the canyon sides were huge slabs of metamorphic rock, shiny dark grey, with huge white veins of pegmatite, creating an effect like a giant marble cake. Its magnificence comes from being so narrow and so deep and with such vertical sides. And so big, it is over 50 miles long. So difficult is the terrain at the bottom that it was not explored properly until 1880, some thirty years after the Grand Canyon had be tamed by Powell.

There is a road which travels along the south rim of the canyon, giving us more than half a dozen new and jaw dropping views of the Black Canyon. The trouble is that such scale is difficult to capture with a photograph, also the splendour is actually quite tiring, so after we had our fill of gawping we drove gently back to the trailer, where we had  another campfire, courtesy of the surrounding campers, who had left their wood behind after their weekend camping.