In reply to UKC Articles:
Terrific article. Where was the photo looking down the river to the Painted Wall taken from? I'll be visiting next September - just as part of a road trip round Colorado and New Mexico, my days of vertical ambitions are long since gone - and I'd love to have the chance of catching a similar shot.
As for the surprisingly low number of Brits that seem to know about the Black Canyon, well I've often thought that the western USA does physical geography like the UK does history; there's just too much of it to get to know it all. Within an hour's drive of where I am, and without thinking too much about it, there are at least three medieval castles, two cathedrals of similar age (maybe another one as well), a large number of stone circles and earthworks of about 4,000 - 5,00 years old, ruined abbeys, Roman roads, the list goes on and on; so much so that something so old that it might be celebrated as a national treasure in the USA is here just part of the background noise. The western US is the same but with hills, mountains, rivers, gorges, volcanoes and more and something that we consider a major geographical feature in Britain would, in the USA, be so trivial as not even to have a name.
So the average Brit would have to look closely to find the Black Canyon. That's perhaps not a bad thing, but I'm sure you'll have raised the profile of it considerably with this article and a good many people might be having a web search to find out a bit more once they've put away the Christmas celebrations.
T.