Travel to Work

The largest gorge of the world is Grand Canyon of the Colorado River having 290 miles long deep slash across the face of the Plateau in northern Arizona. It measures 18 miles across, average width is 10 miles and average depth is one mile. This massive gorge with rock Rise Mountains higher than any in the eastern United States and those dark walls of gorges millions of years old. The interesting thing about this scene is that the Colorado River drops 2,200 feet over nearly 200 rapids as it roars through the Canyon toward the Gulf of California.

The numbers and statistics can only describe limited part of Canyon’s story that can’t display its full picture and magic of its myriad hues strata, spires, and gorges. The place is having so much variation that no one can measure or make a guess about its particular part.

In 1869 John Wesley Powel’s party was the 1^st one to traverse the canyon by river, he written that you cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view because it’s an unchangeable spectacle   from which a curtain might be lifted.

A mile below the rim at the canyon’s bottom the Colorado River slices through Granite Gorge, exposing some of the oldest rocks visible anywhere on the earth. Those rocks are nearly 2 billion years old; the Vishnu schist is the gleaming black remnant of a once towering mountain range. It became colorful sediments of the Grand Canyon Series atop schist because of rifting faulting which kept on changing it from almost 500 million years.

There are ten distinct layers of sandstone, limestone, and shale bespeak the advance and retreat of ancient seas, the building up and wearing down of mountains, the meandering of rivers over 600 million years.

Each rim is studded with fossilized sponges, corals, snails, and shellfish all these were once part of the warm sea 240 million years ago. Anyhow the rocks were covering this ancient seabed, all geologic signs of the more recent Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras wore away eons ago.

By comparing it with the nearly two billion year process of deposition, erosion had set a brisk pace The Grand Canyon itself is almost less than six million years old, created only since the Colorado River changes its course and began flowing to the ancestral plateau. Within only 2 million years the river sliced to with in 500 feet above its current depth and the changing weathers like wind, cold, rain, snow, and heat had helped that changing process so much. It caused by the flow of the hundreds of tributaries, many of which are dry washes, these tributaries that flow mostly in summer season because of the snowmelt and thunderstorms. Flow of these hundreds of streams created a composite of thousands, of ten thousands of gorges.

In words of Powell  “Every one of these is a world of beauty in itself”.

The Grand Canyon is not only a slice of North America’s geologic history but that also haves importance in section of ecozones.  Traveling along the Grand Canyon the travelers will find same variety of ecological regions they would encounter on a trip from Canada to Mexico. A vast diversity of the sceneries like the snowy evergreen woods of the boreal zone to the arid depths of the lower Sonoran, the place where temperature rose above 100oF and tenacious shrubs like creosote and ocotillo predominate.  The main and bottom line is that the Great Canyon provides a rich diversity of habitat having more than 400 vertebrate species and 1,500 plants.

Almost 4,000 years back humans made their presence here in this area, specially the hunters who made images of animals on limestone caves.

Pueblo peoples who disappeared in 1150 A.D. they were living in and around the canyon for a millennium or more. They had left a rich legacy of pottery, baskets, and pictographs, and granaries and other structures in thousands of sites. Now the Havasupai people in the region today trace their presence back hundred of years.

But in the 20^th century the humans made a profound impact on the Grand Canyon than in all of the past. By 1900 it became a well-known place for the travelers especially because of the written accounts by the explorers and the scientists and to the glowing canvases of Thomas Moran.

It was established as a Grand Canyon National Park in 1919, which attracted the visitors and tourists.

Currently statistics about the visitors shows that only 5 million people now visit the canyon each year by car, on foot, atop mules, on motorized rafts and in helicopters In 1963 Glen Canyon Dam was made there which ended the free flow of Colorado River at the Grand Canyon’s entrance. This single event by human changed the canyon a lot more than any other event in human times.

According to John Wesley Powell a century ago rushing water in the canyon was having a symphony of multitudinous melodies. But making of dam on it in 1963 affected the canyon’s complex ecosystems and its ecological richness declined rapidly since 1963.

In 1996 officials opened the Glen Canyon Dam for a week long trial to imitate the natural flooding but that test failed because of the ecological imbalances that had taken hold, the event marked an important acknowledgement that nature’s imperatives.

You might also like

Nine Overrated Destinations with Nine Great Alternatives In my travels around the world, I have seen a lot of conventional sites and a lot of off-the-grid sites...

Top 10 Super Sized Holes in Our Planet These top 10 amazing holes are geographical phenomena and most astounding sites in the world. These breathtaking...

Swimming in Yellowstone This question is mostly asked, that can I swim in a geyser in Yellowstone? Answer is always NO, swimming...

Five of the most ruthless waters in the world We all are amazed by sights of the many wonders of the earth. We are blessed by the many bountiful features...