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Fun Facts About The Grand Canyon
Arrival of First Train to Grand Canyon National Park in 1901 Courtesy Grand Canyon National Park
Grand Canyon
There is nothing else in the world quite like the Grand Canyon. The sheer scale, immensity, and uniqueness leaves you breathless.
Here is a magnificent hole in the ground some 5,000-feet deep, 277 miles long (measured by the route of the Colorado River), and upwards of 18 miles in width.
Many other canyons drop sheer or steeply to their bottoms, but the Grand Canyon’s profile is stair-stepped. Each horizontal layer of rock, be it sandstone, limestone, shale, or some metamorphic type, is of a different hardness and therefore erodes at a different rate, giving us a canyon of unusual breadth and appearance.
These incredible geologic layers reveal the earth’s long history like pages in a book. The oldest stories are more than 1.8 billion years old. With weather and erosion still writing today’s stories.
Not only is the Grand Canyon a geologic marvel, it is also home to:
- more than 1400 species of flowering plants
- hundreds of species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians
- a variety of habitats that mirror ones found from the boreal forests of southern Canada to the sun-baked deserts of northern Mexico.
- And then there is the human aspect. For more than 12,000 years, people have lived in the Grand Canyon region. From the Atlatyl throwing archaic hunters to the Anasazi, the Cohonina, the Sinagua, and other cultural groups. Today, the Havasupai still inhabit the area.