Arizona · 277 river miles · up to 18 miles wide · about 6,000 ft deep · national park since 1919
Grand Canyon map
The Grand Canyon is the gorge the Colorado River has cut into the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona: 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide and about a mile deep. It has been a national park since 1919.
Where the Grand Canyon is
The canyon lies entirely in northern Arizona, on the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau. It begins at Lees Ferry, just below Glen Canyon Dam and the Utah line, and ends 277 river miles downstream at the Grand Wash Cliffs, where the Colorado River enters Lake Mead near the Nevada border. The plateau it is cut into is the Kaibab on the north side and the Coconino on the south; the river inside is at about 2,400 ft at the eastern end and 1,200 ft at the western end.
Key measurements
- Length: 277 miles along the river.
- Width: 4 to 18 miles rim to rim; about 10 miles across at Grand Canyon Village, though the drive around from South Rim to North Rim is 215 miles.
- Depth: about 6,000 ft at its deepest; roughly a mile below the South Rim.
- Rims: the South Rim is at about 7,000 ft and open all year; the North Rim is 1,000 ft higher, at about 8,000 ft, and closed by snow from roughly November to May.
- Rock: the Vishnu Schist at the bottom is about 1.7 billion years old; the Kaibab Limestone on the rim is about 270 million years old.
- Park: Grand Canyon National Park covers about 1.2 million acres (about 1,900 square miles). It was a national monument in 1908 and a national park on February 26, 1919.
- Rapids: about 160 named rapids; a full river trip takes one to three weeks.
Getting there
The South Rim entrance at Tusayan is 80 miles north of Flagstaff and 60 miles north of Williams (where the Grand Canyon Railway starts), 230 miles from Phoenix and about 275 miles from Las Vegas. The North Rim is reached through Jacob Lake, 45 miles south of the Utah line; Kanab, Utah, and Page, Arizona, are the nearest towns. Grand Canyon West, with the Skywalk on the Hualapai reservation, is 125 miles east of Las Vegas and outside the national park. Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, but the Navajo Nation east of the park does.
People of the canyon
The Havasupai live in Supai, inside a side canyon on the south side, the only village in the US where mail still arrives by mule. The Hualapai reservation runs along the western South Rim, and the Navajo Nation borders the eastern end. John Wesley Powell led the first recorded river descent in 1869; the South Rim railroad arrived in 1901 and made the canyon a tourist destination.
How the canyon shaped the map
The Arizona Strip, the piece of Arizona north of the canyon, is cut off from the rest of the state: until the Navajo Bridge opened at Marble Canyon in 1929, there was no road crossing between Lees Ferry and the Nevada line, and the Strip still looks to Utah for its shopping and schools. The canyon also separates the state's two Mountain-time counties on the north from the Colorado Plateau towns on the south. Two of the three largest reservoirs in the country bracket it: Lake Powell above and Lake Mead below.