October 7, 2016 - Part 2

We headed home after the Million Dollar Highway drive, 

stopping at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park near Montrose.

The park surrounds part of a deep, steep-walled gorge carved through Precambrian rock by the Gunnison River.  The park contains 12 miles of the 48-mile long canyon of the Gunnison River.  The national park itself contains the deepest and most dramatic section of the canyon, but the canyon continues upstream into Curecanti National Recreation Area and downstream into Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area.  The canyon's name owes itself to the fact that parts of the gorge only receive 33 minutes of sunlight a day, according to Images of America: The Black Canyon of the Gunnison. In the book, author Duane Vandenbusche states, "Several canyons of the American West are longer and some are deeper, but none combines the depth, sheerness, narrowness, darkness, and dread of the Black Canyon."

The Gunnison River drops an average of 34 feet per mile through the entire canyon, making it the 5th steepest mountain descent in North America. By comparison, the Colorado River drops an average of 7.5 feet per mile through the Grand Canyon.

There's a lot of interesting information about the history of the canyon at wikipedia, where the information I included came from.