Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

An expedition tried in 1900 to work down the gorge in wooden boats to see whether the Gunnison could be tapped for the farms of the Uncompahgre Valley, and abandoned the attempt deep in the canyon. The next summer William Torrence, who had been on that trip, went back with Abraham Lincoln Fellows of the U.S. Geological Survey. They gave up boats and took a rubber air mattress for floating and rubber bags for their instruments, and on August 12, 1901, they started down from Cimarron.

The trip took about nine days. At the Narrows, where the floor squeezes to some forty feet across beneath walls 1,700 feet high, fallen boulders had jammed between the cliffs into bridges and tunnels, and the two men scrambled, swam and hauled each other up a quarter of a mile in a day. They came out below the Painted Wall convinced that a tunnel was possible. Fellows' surveyors worked the canyon for two more years, construction began in 1905, and the Gunnison Tunnel was holed through on July 6, 1909.

The Painted Wall, the tallest cliff in Colorado, rises about 2,250 feet from the river, its dark gneiss and schist striped with pale bands of pegmatite where molten rock once forced its way into cracks. The canyon became a national monument in March 1933. The South Rim Road runs about seven miles from the visitor center past Chasm View and the Painted Wall overlooks; the North Rim is reached by a separate gravel road, and the descents to the river are unmaintained routes for experienced hikers with a permit.