Black Canyon of the Gunnison

The West owns more than its share of America’s provocative geographical names: Idaho’s River of No Return, Cape Disappointment in Washington, California’s Death Valley, Wyoming’s Crazy Woman Creek and Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison. They sing to the traveler a siren song.

What’s so seductive about the name of the great cut that slices through the Uncompahgre tableland west of the Colorado Rockies: Black Canyon of the Gunnison? The simple eight syllables of this National Park perhaps inspire an image of dark depths through which one might wander forever, lost.

In 1901, Abraham Lincoln Fellows and William Torrence were moved (not by a desire for adventure, but by a need for irrigation water) to explore the dark, forbidding ravine as they rolled down its river on a rubber mattress, floating 33 miles in nine days. Fellows, though there on business, was stirred to near poetry.

“Our surroundings were of the wildest possible description,” he wrote. “The roar of the water … was constantly in our ears, and the walls of the canyon, towering half a mile in height above us, were seemingly vertical. Occasionally a rock would fall from one side or the other, with a roar and crash, exploding like a ton of dynamite when it struck bottom, making us think our last day had come.”

Like many of the West’s great gorges, the Black Canyon materializes suddenly, a stunning surprise. Were you walking or riding innocently by, through deep fir forests or along a scrubby plateau only yards from the edge, you would never anticipate the falling away of the earth, the plunging of rock walls so sheer that sunlight penetrates the deepest cleft only at high noon.

Today, we know the Gunnison is there, one of the newest of the National Parks (since 1999) and long a National Monument (born in 1933), yet the approach from either the South Rim (Highway 347) or the North Rim Road (closed in winter) yields no inkling, no intimation of the awesome cut about to fall away just in front of your feet.

Rain, wind and the Gunnison River took a long time—two million years, say—to chew through the soft volcanic rock cover, then to attack the crystalline core of this uplift and to eat away its walls to a depth of 2,772 feet. Yes, Arizona’s Grand Canyon is deeper, wider, incomparably more vast, while Yosemite Valley surpasses in the beauty of its rock outcrops and its high, shimmering waterfalls. Yet, wrote geologist Wallace Hansen, “…no other canyon in North America combines the depth, narrowness, sheerness and somber countenance of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.”

Within this National Park, the river drops an average of 96 feet per mile and in one two-mile stretch dives 480 feet, a rambunctious waterslide only nature could design. In 48 miles through Black Canyon it loses more elevation than the 1,500-mile Mississippi can claim from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.
Perched precariously above Chasm View, I felt the absurd urge to soar into space like a peregrine falcon, to swoop up and down the perpendicular hanging cliffs. Nobody ever has lived in Black Canyon, neither the Ute Indians who have inhabited the region since before written history nor the Spanish explorers who passed by without comment. Forever, only water ouzels, badgers, cougars, bear, wrens and swifts and great horned owls have called it home.

Black Canyon’s sculptor, the river, and the nearby town of Gunnison (pop. 4,300+) owe their names to one Capt. John Williams Gunnison, a U.S. Army topographical engineer (second in his West Point class), selected to lead a search for a railroad bed between the 38th and 39th Parallels. In the Tomichi Valley where Gunnison town sits today, the party forged south to avoid a gorge they considered impenetrable. Just beyond, in Utah, Gunnison and all but four of the 11 members of his group were ambushed and killed on Oct. 26, 1853, by a band of Paiutes in revenge for the murder of their chief by white settlers. (Were he around today, Gunnison could tell his tale at Donita’s Cantina in the town named for him.)

Here we drove in high mountains of summer: the Sangre de Cristo, the Sawatch, the Ruby Range and the San Juans; among piñon pines, cottonwood trees and quaking aspens; across alpine meadows that sloped toward flat, agricultural prairies. From the Denver Airport, we sped west on Interstate 70, then slowed near Glenwood Springs to follow States 82 and 133 to Redstone.

Where bachelor miners employed by coal baron John Cleveland Osgood once bunked (1902), we settled with happy sighs into the old Redstone Inn (1925, last restored in 1989). With the dining room closed for a wedding party, we ambled down the street for a dinner under whispering trees at the Crystal Club. We toasted the mountain gods.

From Redstone, it’s a matter of minutes south to the metropolis of Marble (pop. 105) and, more important, to its quarry where Yule marble was discovered in 1873 and which contributed its milky white stone to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. It is passing strange to poke about among the still-rich ruins where nothing much has happened since floods and mudslides wracked the region in 1941. Mountain slopes rise above the rushing but seemingly harmless creek, lined by tumbled slabs of precious rock.

Three little towns north and east of Black Canyon—Glenwood Springs, Delta and Montrose—boast their own superlatives. Glenwood Springs, a busy stop in winter for skiers detraining from Amtrak’s California Zephyr for ultra-posh Aspen just up the Roaring Fork Valley, boasts the world’s largest outdoor, hot-water swimming pool and the burial place of gunslinger Doc Holliday. In Delta, not far from 10,000-foot-high Grand Mesa, earth’s greatest flattop mountain, the C&J Family Restaurant serves a stem-winding lemonade and offers menus for “Senior Citizens & Light Eaters.” Open Mike Night is staged weekly at Kokopelli’s. In Montrose at Jojo’s Windmill, we spotted a woman of about 77 seasons outfitted in a cheery red pantsuit and absorbed in a thin volume entitled The Outhouse Book.

Ouray (pop. 813), south of Montrose, remembers a distinguished Ute chief and is locally pronounced YOO-ray. Nine blocks long and six blocks wide, the town looks about as it did a century ago. Ouray commands the Million Dollar Highway, a portion of the spectacular San Juan Skyway that climbs up and down the mountains on a 260-mile loop drive. The place to dine seems to be Billy Goat Gruff’s Biergarten. All the news that fits used to be printed in the late, much-lamented San Juan Horseshoe, a self-described “clever smokescreen of half-truths, bumbling and weak conjecture.” Once I yearned to investigate further an ad that read: “Gay yucca plant would like to meet others of same persuasion for perennial relationship.”

From Durango (of which Will Rogers once quipped, “It’s out of the way and glad of it”), we followed beautiful U.S. 160 to Cortez, hung a right to Dolores and curved over Taylor Mesa to Telluride (pop. 2,221) in its hideout behind gray granite and red sandstone mountains.

Telluride may be a smart ski resort in winter, but in summer it’s as laid-back as all get-out. The local Telluride Watch reports what readers want to know about the new Back Country Inn near Norwood, the blessing of a bronze sculpture of Chief Ouray, water rights, fifth- and sixth-grade volunteers, and reducing carbon footprints by having smaller families.

Telluride, named for tellurium, a semi-metallic element not found there, seems about a 1-street place with a clutch of restaurants rather more sophisticated than in a country town not luring skiers (we liked the Excelsior) and a good selection of hotels (ours was and will be again the San Sophia.).
Strange how a short idyll can illuminate the imagination. Maybe in another life I was a happy Black Canyon wren, warbling wild and haunting lyrics by day and munching dumb, silly spiders at night.