"No other canyon in North America combines the depth, narrowness, sheerness, and somber countenance of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison," wrote geologist Wallace Hansen. The Ute People hunted and gathered plants along its rim, but there is no evidence they entered the canyon. They regarded it as a sacred, dangerous place and, perhaps, a portal to the underworld.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park is tucked away in an otherwise untraveled part of Colorado's west slope. The first morning I awoke, camped on the park's north side in the late 1970s, I took the short walk to the canyon rim and was shocked to realize a nearly vertical half-mile drop to the Gunnison River. So precipitous, in fact, that the distance between the north and south rims is less than its depth. While the canyon is not black, it has a solemn and breathtaking aspect that gave me pause; it was at once beautiful and strange, exhilarating and melancholy.

As with the West's other desert rivers—the San Juan, Colorado, Green, and Yampa—that chisel deep canyons through the Colorado Plateau, the Gunnison River carved its course through land that, over time, rose several thousand feet from sea level. As it did so, the river's raw power cleared rocks from its inner gorge and dug deeper into the hard and ancient gneiss and schist.

This photograph – taken in the early morning, looking south from the park's easternmost overlook – captures the deeply shadowed canyon foregrounded by the colorful, lichen-covered rim rocks that reflect the dawn's first light.

Location research and commentary by James Baker.