50 free Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park trivia quiz covers the narrow, shadowed gorge in western Colorado that Duane Vandenbusche said combines 'depth, sheerness, narrowness, darkness, and dread' like no other canyon in the West. Questions cover the dimensions (2,722 feet deep at Warner Point, 40 feet wide at the river, the 2,250-foot Painted Wall), the geology of 1.7-billion-year-old gneiss and schist laced with pegmatite, and the river that cut through it an inch a century. The history is a story of people trying to get through: the Ute who avoided it, Captain Gunnison's 1853 survey and his death in Utah, William Jackson Palmer's narrow-gauge railroad and Rudyard Kipling's 'mad ride' through the gorge, the engineer whose 20-day survey took 68 days, the 1901 rubber-raft descent by Fellows and Torrence that found a site for the Gunnison Tunnel, and the monument that finally became a park in 1999. Wildlife, the Gold Medal trout water, the Curecanti reservoirs upstream and the canyon's odd cultural footprints round it out. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our US National Parks quiz next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Black Canyon was carved by which river?
The Gunnison
The park holds the deepest 12 miles of the 48-mile gorge; the north rim, reached from Crawford, closes in winter.
Q 02Why is the canyon called 'Black'?
Its walls are so steep that little sunlight reaches the bottom
Parts of the gorge get only 33 minutes of sun a day, so the walls sit in shadow and look black.
Q 03Per one park history, how many minutes of sunlight do the darkest parts of the gorge get each day?
33
Author Duane Vandenbusche wrote that other western canyons are longer or deeper, 'but none combines the depth, sheerness, narrowness, darkness, and dread of the Black Canyon.'
Q 04How wide is the canyon at its narrowest point down at the river?
40 feet
That spot is called The Narrows; at the rim the tightest gap is about 1,100 feet.
Q 05What is the canyon's greatest depth, measured at Warner Point?
2,722 feet
The Narrows is 1,725 feet deep; Hells Canyon in Idaho, North America's deepest, drops 8,043 feet.
Q 06The Painted Wall, the tallest cliff in Colorado, rises how far from river to rim?
2,250 feet
That is nearly twice the height of the Empire State Building; its pink stripes are veins of coarse igneous rock squeezed into the dark gneiss.
Q 07The light-coloured stripes across the Painted Wall are made of which coarse-grained igneous rock?
Pegmatite
Its quartz, feldspar and mica crystals can grow six feet long; being tougher than the surrounding gneiss and schist, it stands out in bold relief.
Q 08How old are the gneiss and schist that make up most of the canyon walls?
About 1.7 billion years
They were cooked and squeezed when volcanic island arcs collided with the southern edge of what is now Wyoming.
Q 09At what rate did the Gunnison River carve down through the hard Precambrian rock?
About an inch every 100 years
The river was bigger and muddier then; trapped in the hard rock and unable to change course, it simply ground straight down.
Q 10The Gunnison drops 34 ft per mile through its canyon. How does that compare with the Colorado in the Grand Canyon?
Roughly four to five times steeper
The Colorado falls about 7.5 feet per mile; the Gunnison's steepest stretch plunges 240 feet per mile.
Q 11Where in the park does the river make its steepest plunge, 240 feet per mile?
Chasm View
The park holds the deepest and most dramatic 12 miles of the 48-mile canyon.
Q 12The Gunnison, one of the Colorado River's largest tributaries, joins it at which city?
Grand Junction
In some years its flow rivals the bigger river at the confluence; the Spanish once called it the Rio de San Javier.
Q 13How long is the whole Black Canyon, from Curecanti downstream to the Gunnison Gorge?
48 miles
The park protects the deepest section; the canyon runs on upstream into Curecanti National Recreation Area and downstream into the Gunnison Gorge conservation area.
Q 21Rail service through the canyon was finally abandoned in which decade?
1950s
A route through Glenwood Springs took the through traffic after 1890, but the 'Black Canyon Line' carried local trains for another 60 years; a steel bridge survives at Cimarron.
Q 22What were Abraham Lincoln Fellows and William Torrence seeking on the canyon's first recorded descent in 1901?
A site for a water-diversion tunnel
The Uncompahgre Valley was short of water; after 10 days, 70-plus swims and a 30-mile run they emerged with a suitable spot.
Q 23What did the 1901 explorers use instead of the wooden boats that had doomed a 1900 attempt?
A multi-chambered rubber raft
Q 14Which Native people knew the canyon long before Europeans and are said to have avoided it out of superstition?
The Ute
They called the river 'much rocks, big water'; two Spanish expeditions had passed by before 1776.
Q 15Captain John Williams Gunnison first described the canyon in 1853 while surveying what?
A railroad route to the Pacific
He called the country 'the roughest, most hilly and most cut up' he had seen and detoured south around the gorge toward the Uncompahgre Valley.
Q 16What happened to Captain Gunnison later in 1853?
He was killed by Ute warriors in Utah
A band of Pahvant Ute attacked his party near Sevier Lake, killing him and seven others; the river and the town of Gunnison were named in his honour.
Q 17Which railroad ran the first passenger train through the canyon on 13 August 1882?
Denver and Rio Grande
William Jackson Palmer's line reached Gunnison in 1881 to serve the San Juan mines; the terrain forced him to use 3-foot narrow gauge.
Q 18Carving the 15-mile railroad bed from Sapinero to Cimarron reportedly cost how much per mile?
$165,000
Irish and Italian labourers took over a year; the last mile is said to have cost more than the entire Royal Gorge project.
Q 19In December 1882, Bryan Bryant set out to survey the inner canyon, expecting 20 days. How long did it take?
68
Eight of his twelve men quit within days, terrified; he came back declaring the canyon impenetrable, and the line was routed south of it.
Q 20Which famous writer called his 1889 train ride through the gorge 'the mad ride'?
Rudyard Kipling
He said the track seemed to be built 'on the simple principle of dropping miscellaneous dirt into the river and pinning a few rails a-top.'
It had a lifeline all round and floated their 35-pound packs; they carried hunting knives, silk ropes and rubber bags for their instruments.
Q 24How long is the Gunnison Tunnel, completed in 1909 to carry river water to the Uncompahgre Valley?
5.8 miles
It cost nearly $3 million and 26 lives, and was the world's longest irrigation tunnel at the time; President Taft came out to dedicate it.
Q 25Which president dedicated the Gunnison Tunnel on 23 September 1909?
William Howard Taft
Early tunnelling was done by hand and candlelight, one miner turning the drill while another swung a sledgehammer; most men quit after two weeks.
Q 26How many workers died building the tunnel over its four years?
26
Crews faced carbon dioxide, heat, mud, flooding and a fractured fault zone; it took almost a year to bore 2,000 feet of water-filled rock.
Q 27In which year was Black Canyon of the Gunnison first protected as a national monument?
1933
A New Deal work crew then built the North Rim Road and its five overlooks, now a historic district.
Q 28In which year did it become a national park?
1999
The change added 4,000 acres from the Bureau of Land Management and created the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area downstream at the same time.
Q 29Which New Deal agency built the North Rim Road and its overlooks in the mid-1930s?
Civilian Conservation Corps
The five miles of road and five overlooks are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Q 30What fraction of the park was designated wilderness in 1976?
About half
That is 15,599 acres; the 2,500-acre Sanburg Ranch was added to the park in 2017.