Black Canyon of the Gunnison South Rim Road: Tomichi Point to High Point

Welcome to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. This tour follows the South Rim Road for about seven miles, from Tomichi Point out to High Point, where the road ends. There are twelve overlooks along the way. We'll stop at nine of them. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there.

First, what you've come to see. The canyon runs forty-eight miles, and fourteen of those miles are inside the park. The Park Service puts it plainly: this is not the steepest, the deepest or the narrowest canyon in the West, but it's an impressive example of all three combined. The rock in its walls is nearly two billion years old, and the river has been cutting down into it for about two million years, at roughly an inch every hundred years.

One more thing before we start. In July of 2025, a fire started by lightning burned more than four thousand acres on and around the South Rim. Some of the ground along this rim is still recovering, and park officials said the pinyon and juniper woodland could take decades to grow back, so the fire is part of the story you'll hear along the way.

This is Tomichi Point, the first overlook on the rim. Look at the walls below you. Much of the rock here is a fine-grained gneiss, and it's layered, like the pages of a very old book.

Those layers began as sand and mud on the floor of an ancient sea, with volcanic ash drifting down into it. The sediment was buried deep, and great heat and pressure turned it into the hard metamorphic rocks geologists call schist and gneiss. That change happened about one point eight billion years ago.

Somewhere in the walls just upstream runs a dike of dark rock called diabase, nearly eight miles long and more than three hundred feet wide in places. It breaks down quickly in the weather, so it rarely shows itself well. Upstream, too, the walls are broken by the Red Rocks fault, one of the two major faults that cross this country. The geologist who wrote the classic guide to this canyon, in 1965, noted that its displacement can be seen from right here, looking southeast, up the river.

Now listen. On a still day, you can hear the rapids echo up the canyon walls. That sound is the canyon, still being made.

You're at the South Rim Visitor Center. When the South Rim Fire burned through in the summer of 2025, this building survived; the campground, a maintenance building and several vault toilets did not.

The short trail from here leads out to Gunnison Point, and it's worth the walk, because the overlook stands right on top of one of the rocks that make this canyon so striking.

That rock is pegmatite. It's an igneous rock, mostly feldspar, quartz and mica, that forced its way into the older gneiss as molten rock, deep underground, and cooled slowly enough to grow huge crystals. In this canyon, single feldspar crystals can be three feet across, even six. Out at the point, look closely: the pink is feldspar, the milky white is quartz, and the pearly flakes are mica.

The name on the river, and on the park, belongs to John Williams Gunnison, a U.S. Army officer who led expeditions looking for a railroad route through the Rocky Mountains. Before the mid-1800s, the river went by other names, among them the Grand River.

This visitor center came out of Mission 66, a national program to finish park projects by the Park Service's fiftieth anniversary, in 1966. A ranger information trailer stood at Gunnison Point from 1962, and the headquarters and visitor center were finished in 1966, so the park could stay open all year. In winter, this is still as far as cars can go. Beyond here, the road belongs to skiers and snowshoers until spring.

A geologist who wrote the classic guide to this canyon in 1965 said that if you can only see a few places, make them Gunnison Point, Chasm View and Sunset View, and the end of the road at High Point, and this tour stops at every one of them.

This is Pulpit Rock. The parking area and the trail out to the point were built by that Civilian Conservation Corps crew in 1938.

From the rail, look across at the far wall. It's laced with straight, nearly vertical, light-colored bands, an orderly swarm of them cutting through the darker rock. Those are dikes of pegmatite: molten rock that forced its way into cracks deep underground and cooled there, well over a billion years ago. Pegmatite resists erosion better than the rock around it, so the bands stand out.

Look for the tall, separate pinnacles on the far side, too. A geologist put the pinnacles across from this overlook at about sixteen hundred feet high. They're made of gneiss, cut apart along vertical cracks called joints. The deep clefts between them were opened mostly by frost. Water seeps into a crack, freezes, and pries it a little wider, again and again, every winter.

The rock at this overlook is the same layered gneiss as at the first stop: ancient sea-floor sand and mud, pressed and heated into stone.

Stand here long enough and you're watching the canyon widen. It's just doing it very, very slowly.

This is Cross Fissures View, and the name tells you what to look for.

Rock this hard doesn't wear away evenly. It breaks along cracks that geologists call joints: long, nearly vertical fractures, formed when the earth's crust was strained. In this canyon, the most prominent family of joints runs northwest, and this overlook looks out along a zone of very large ones. Widened by weathering, they've become great open fissures, hundreds of feet deep and thousands of feet long.

The tools that widen them are simple. Water seeps in and freezes, forcing the crack open a little. It thaws and freezes again, like a ratchet. In time, whole masses of rock come loose from the wall and fall to the canyon floor, some of them the size of houses. The river then grinds them down and carries them away.

The same northwest-running cracks cut into the face of the Painted Wall, farther down the canyon.

What looks like one solid wall is really a set of giant blocks, slowly coming apart.

This is Chasm View, and right next to it, Painted Wall View: two overlooks a short walk apart, at the most dramatic part of the rim. Chasm View is also the northernmost point on the South Rim road.

At Chasm View, the canyon is eighteen hundred and twenty feet deep and just eleven hundred feet across at the rim, its narrowest width at the top anywhere in the park. The river below makes its steepest descent in the park here, too. Look at the walls close by. This is a speckled, granite-like rock called quartz monzonite, studded with pink feldspar crystals one to two inches long. The geologist who wrote the 1965 guide called this overlook possibly the best place to see it, both close up and at long range.

Then walk over to the Painted Wall. At about two thousand two hundred and fifty feet from river to rim, it's the tallest cliff in Colorado, nearly twice the height of the Empire State Building. The pale streaks that give it its name are pegmatite, molten rock that squeezed into the darker gneiss deep underground and cooled slowly enough to grow crystals up to six feet long. Much of its feldspar is pink. The pattern swirls across the sheer cliff below Serpent Point, on the rim across the canyon.

Peregrine falcons nest on ledges in walls like these. They hunt other birds, mostly swifts and swallows, diving on them at up to two hundred miles an hour. Every year from mid-March to mid-July, the park closes some climbing areas to protect their nests.

The river cuts down through this rock at about an inch a century. At that pace, the Geological Survey figures it would take more than two and a half million years to carve the Painted Wall from top to bottom. You're looking at one of the most patient works in the West.

This is Cedar Point. The trail out to the overlook is a self-guiding nature trail, which makes this a good place to meet the trees of the rim.

Here's the first surprise: there are no true cedars in this park. The Park Service lists its cone-bearing trees as spruces, firs, junipers and pines. The trees early settlers called cedars were junipers, named for their deep red heartwood. People have used juniper for thousands of years: the bark for rope, sandals and clothing, the berries for food, and the wood for building and for tools.

Its usual companion is the pinyon pine. Pinyon nuts are a rich food, still a traditional food for American Indians, and a pinyon takes almost twenty-six months to produce its next crop of seeds. Old-growth pinyon and juniper woodland grows on the rims at around eight thousand feet, and some of its pinyons are more than seven hundred years old.

At the overlook, look across at the canyon wall. Here the light-colored pegmatite dikes wander through the rock at low angles, irregular and almost random, quite unlike the neat vertical bands across from Pulpit Rock. The 1965 guide puts the difference down to the way each kind of host rock cracks.

Slow-growing trees above a slow-cutting river. Nothing here is in a hurry.

This is Dragon Point. Across the canyon is Serpent Point, seven thousand nine hundred and twenty-two feet high, and the cliff beneath it is the Painted Wall. Look for those pale festoons of pegmatite swirling across its face.

Look at the cliffs nearer to you, too. Deep fissures, cut along the same northwest-running cracks as at Cross Fissures View, indent the face of the Painted Wall and the cliffs here at Dragon Point.

If you come back after dark, this is one of the places the park suggests for the night sky. It sits far enough from the road to be shielded from passing headlights, and in September of 2015 Black Canyon was certified as an International Dark Sky Park. The Milky Way is brightest in summer, when we face the center of our galaxy. The best nights are around the new moon, or when the moon rises late. A red light keeps your night vision, and keeps the dark a little darker for everyone else.

A dragon and a serpent, facing each other across a canyon of ancient rock. Whoever named these two points had the right idea.

This is Sunset View, one of the three overlooks that the 1965 guide to this canyon recommended to visitors in a hurry, along with Gunnison Point and Chasm View.

Look far down the canyon for very dark bands and masses on the walls. That's amphibolite, a dark metamorphic rock rich in hornblende. Thick bodies of it crop out between Warner Point and the mouth of Red Rock Canyon, and they can be seen at a distance from here and from High Point. Red Rock Canyon is where Fellows and Torrence came out in 1901, at the end of their swim.

The cliffs along this whole stretch of the rim, from Rock Point past Chasm View, Cedar Point and Dragon Point, out to here and High Point, are carved from one great body of that speckled quartz monzonite, about three square miles of it at the surface. The same guide calls this the most rugged reach of the canyon.

This is another of the park's suggested stargazing spots, so it's worth a return visit after dark.

A canyon this hard tells its history in stripes and bands. You just have to know which one you're looking at.

This is High Point, eight thousand two hundred and eighty-nine feet up, at the end of the South Rim road.

The 1965 guide to this canyon called High Point a good bird's-eye view of the whole region. Across the canyon to the northeast are the West Elk Mountains, the remains of volcanoes that once buried this country in ash and lava. On the southern horizon are the San Juan Mountains, with Uncompahgre Peak, Mount Sneffels and Lone Cone among the summits. And about twenty-five hundred feet below, down in the valley, is the town of Montrose, where the tunnel's water goes to work.

The nature trail that starts here leads to Warner Point, and the deepest spot in the whole canyon, two thousand seven hundred and twenty-two feet, is just north of it. The point is named for Mark Warner. He grew up in Ohio and came to western Colorado in 1917 to be the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Montrose. When the Lions Club disbanded in the fall of 1932, Reverend Warner took up the campaign for a monument, sending maps and promotional material to Colorado's congressmen until President Hoover signed the proclamation in 1933. Years later he wrote that he had wanted to make this remarkable canyon available to the people of the local community, and to others throughout the country who would enjoy seeing it. In 1999, the monument became a national park.

The trail guide also points out the scar of an earlier fire. In July of 1996, a lightning strike started a blaze that burned about eight hundred acres before a cold front brought rain. Fire is part of this land. The oak brush comes back well; the pinyons and junipers take decades.

That's the end of our tour of the South Rim. Thank you for riding along with me, and for taking the time to look down.