Location

How the Grand Canyon was made

Dave is a professor in the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and teaches undergraduate geology classes. He’s used to offering clear, simple, geological explanations for beginners, making him a perfect companion for me on this ride.

As a blue heron flies above and the strum of a guitar comes from another boat, he tells me something startling: “We still don’t know precisely how the Grand Canyon got here. Kinda crazy, huh?”

Sure, we know the Colorado River has been carving the canyon for about 6 million years. But no one knows why a river would cut into this very hard, solid rock in the first place.

“There must be easier places for water to go,” Dave continues. “There are softer rocks and easier routes all around us. Water wants to take the path of least resistance. But for some reason, it chose to eat its way down and carve this very narrow gorge we’re now floating through.”

There are several complex suggestions out there for why this could be, but nothing anyone can confirm. “It’s kind of amazing in this world where we have all this instrumentation and technology that we still don’t know how the Grand Canyon got here,” he says.

Vasey’s Paradise

A bright patch of green sprouts from a canyon wall, with a stream of water spilling out. It’s Vasey’s Paradise, named by explorer John Wesley Powell for his friend George Vasey, a botanist who never got to see the place.

Greenery! Ferns! In the desert! This is plant sciences professor Truman Young’s moment. He doesn’t have much time, as we’re quickly filling water jugs from its natural spring and moving on. He yells above the sound of water gushing from the canyon wall.

Truman talks about how this is one sliver of the canyon that is not a desert. The plant leaves here are a dark green rather than the pale green color favored by sun-savvy desert plants. He notes that the spring water could be anywhere from weeks to millions of years old. And he mentions the Kanab ambersnail, an endangered snail that thrives here at Vasey’s but lives nowhere else in the canyon.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were dozens of species here that are found nowhere else in the canyon,” Truman says excitedly.

We’re about to hop back in the boat, but first I catch up with Toby Maxwell, a soil biogeochemistry graduate student, for his take. His boat has been interested in all of the little caves that have popped up along this stretch of limestone, which is easily eroded by the river. As for Vasey’s Paradise?

“It’s really beautiful,” he says. “Definitely an oasis. It’s cool to see places where there’s really no soil that can support the kinds of plants in here. It brings them alive just by having water to drink.”

- Kat Kerlin