Painted Wall

— In our most recent trip to Arizona and Colorado (we re-visited the North Rim of the Grand Canyon NP and Rocky Mountain NP), we had a few days we spent with friends in the Gunnison area. On one of those days, we visited the Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP for the first time. It was a very warm day, but we managed to hike earlier in the day, and later on, we stopped at several overlook points along the canyon’s south rim. The south-rim scenic drive offers amazing views of the canyon, and generally, a visitor does not have to walk far to get to those overlooks. The drive is only about 7 miles (11.25 km) long, but there are a dozen overlooks to visit. So, it’s wise to allow 2-3 hours for your drive. One of those stops was at the Painted Wall overlook. Here you stand and face the tallest cliff in Colorado at 2,300 ft (701 m) tall. To give you some perspective of this height, if the Empire State building stood at the bottom of the canyon, where you can see the Gunnison River, the building would only reach a little over halfway to the top of the cliff! These whitish patterns you see on the rock were created over a billion years ago. They are not painted on the rock. Instead, they are actually three-dimensional. What that means is that if you cut through the rock at one of those lines, a new pattern would be revealed entirely. Those patterns were created by molten rock that cooled inside fractures of the rock.