Little Colorado Gorge

Look for a Scenic View sign on your left. This is the main Little Colorado overlook, a Navajo Nation Tribal Park, with a short walk from the lot, shelters, and waterless restrooms. Bring your own water. Two things before you turn in. A national park pass doesn't work here. This park is under Navajo law. Expect a small entry fee per person. Tribal pages list five or eight dollars. And the listed hours are eight thirty in the morning to four thirty in the afternoon, Mountain Standard Time, so late in the day you could find it shut. Don't come for blue water. The river in the famous photographs gets that color from dissolved calcium carbonate, and most of the blue water comes from springs ten to thirteen miles above where this river meets the Colorado. Less than twenty miles from its source the river dries up, and for about three hundred miles it relies on precipitation. In high runoff, from February to April and July to September, it can run red, so thick that a hand an inch under the surface disappears. Whatever you find down there is the real river, on its own schedule. In nineteen sixty-seven the geologist Edwin McKee proposed that the ancestral Colorado once ran its present course as far as the Kaibab Plateau, then flowed out to the Gulf of Mexico down this very channel. It's one of several hypotheses. Local vendors sell Navajo jewelry and crafts here, and the tribal park says you're welcome to buy from them. Going below the rim takes a separate Navajo backcountry permit, so stay at the overlook. Pulled in? At the highway, turn left, heading east.