The Grand Canyon National Park is home to one of the best-known natural features in the
USA, even the planet, one that is often called one of the seven natural wonders of the world. When you first set eyes on it, grand may seem a misnomer – the canyon is 277 miles long, a mile deep and up to 18 miles wide, carved out of the rust-red rock of the Colorado Plateau over 6 million years by the Colorado River.
While Indigenous peoples, the ancestral Puebloans, lived in and around it for at least 12,000 years, the Grand Canyon didn’t become a tourist sensation until the arrival of the railway in 1901. It was made a national park in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson. It has never just been about the sheer scale of the canyon that so captures the imagination of visitors. It’s also the incredible combination of colours in the rocks, the shapes of the hewn rocks, even the weather (the canyon is large enough to influence the weather), the 1.8 billion years’ worth of geology, sitting there for all to discover. There’s also the experience that a visit here offers – a taste of the timeless scale and splendour of the America West, the stories of exploration and perseverance. You’ll get a taste of this at the Grand Canyon Village, a historical settlement that grew around the railway terminus at the South Rim, with early 20th-century architecture.
Whether you want to follow dusty trails down into the canyon itself, or simply to have your breath stolen away by dramatic vistas from the rim, the deep and rippled beauty of the Grand Canyon will stay with you long after you leave.
