We have never seen anything quite like the Black Canyon.

It is dark, deep, steep, and so starkly rugged that our eyes can’t quite figure out how to see it. We stand above the Gunnison River on the rim of the canyon, with our shoes getting in the way of seeing the river’s course, seemingly almost directly beneath our feet. Here at the South Rim road in the Park, the river runs aggressively 2,000 feet below us. There are many pseudo-trails (leading down to the river) documented in our guidebook, and a typical trail will traverse that 2,000 feet drop in 1-2 miles. That is a 40% grade average, and in fact it’s almost a rock-climbing experience on the shorter trails. Don’t forget the 8,000 foot elevation – these short journeys take 4 hours and are real lung-busters.

The river itself is a geological wonder, in addition to being a visual work of art. In the beginning, the river established its course through relatively soft rock, which created wide valleys. By the time the river hit the super-hard stratum of the Gunnison Uplift, it couldn’t go anywhere else. But it also had a lot of altitude to work with, and it used that height to its advantage to chew through the viciously hard rock of the Uplift.

To put this in perspective: The Gunnison travels 50 miles and falls a greater distance than the Mississippi does in 1,500 miles. For you river buffs, it falls an average of 95 feet per mile, and has one stretch where it rockets downhill at 480 feet per mile, a roaring, rock-eating run below Chasm Point.

But with all that energy, the rocky riverbed is nearly unrelenting, and the river erodes its way downward at the miserly rate of one inch every 100 years. That works out to the width of a human hair every year, on average. It has taken two million years to dig the 2,000 foot depth of the canyon as it is today, revealing about 1.7 billion years worth of geology.

Photography is totally frustrating. I can barely “see and feel” the canyon when I’m standing there. All pictures can do is give a vague hint. Even the professional glossy pix in our guidebook provide only a pale imitation of what we experience standing in the canyon’s presence.

We found out from a Ranger that the dam upstream is going to be releasing a high volume of water for a few days. This hasn’t been done in more than 20 years, and is considered quite an event for the area. The Gunnison runs a seasonal maximum of 12,000 CFS – that’s cubic feet per second. Picture a football field with a foot of water on it. Now think of that much water flowing past your nose in one second. The water release is planned at 10,000 CFS. Should be quite a sight.