Gunnison Gorge Wilderness - Chukar Trail

Author's Comments

The Chukar Trail does not flatter you. It drops thirteen hundred feet in a mile, and every foot of that descent is a foot you will eventually climb back up in full sun on rock that holds the heat. I say this first because the trail is the price of admission, and the admission is real. What you get for it is the inner gorge of the Gunnison below the Black Canyon proper, where the walls go dark and old and the river runs green through a corridor most people will only ever see from above. The metamorphic rock down here is nearly two billion years old. It reads almost black in the wrong light and silver-veined in the right one. Morning is the right one. The sun has to clear the rim before it reaches the water, and there is a window, maybe an hour, where the upper walls catch warm light while the river itself is still in shadow. That contrast is the photograph. The eye goes to the bright stone first and then falls, slowly, to the green water below. I have not seen another person on this trail before nine in the morning. The fishermen come, eventually, but they come for the trout and they walk past the compositions without seeing them. Bring a wide lens for the corridor shots and something longer for the detail work in the rock itself, which rewards close attention more than the guidebooks suggest. The walls have texture that does not photograph from a distance. Plan the climb out for when you still have water and legs. This is canyon country that asks something of you, and gives back accordingly.

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