What Makes a Canyon Grand? And How Deep is Deep? Exploring Kings Canyon, One of the Deepest Canyons in North America

Well, let's jump right into it. The picture above is Spanish Peak in the Sierra Nevada, which looms above the canyon of the Kings River. The peak tops out at 10,051 feet (3,064 meters). The drainage on the left is Rough Creek, and it enters the Kings River at an elevation of about 1,800 feet. The drainage on the right is Deer Creek, and it enters the Kings at about 2,300 feet. This seems to indicate a depth of Kings Canyon as between 8,200 and 7,700 feet, depending on where you choose to define it. 

So, what of it? 

If you search for "the deepest canyon in North America", the honor seems more often to be given to Hells Canyon on the Snake River on the border between Oregon and Idaho. The depth often given is the difference between He-Devil Mountain and the river at 7,993 feet (2,436 meters). Or 8,043 feet (2,452 meters). Or 7,913 feet (2,411 meters).  

So, the designation of "deepest canyon" seems to be somewhat in conflict. The argument can be muddied by pointing out the canyons are asymmetric, and that the other sides of the canyons are less dramatic in height. There is some truth to this, as the south slope at Kings Canyon tops out at just over 7,000 feet, meaning that the canyon is only a little over 5,000 feet deep. But the problem is similar for Hells Canyon, where the ridges across the river are just over 5,000 feet above the river. 

Which is deepest? I don't know, and I don't particularly care. If Idaho needs to have the 'deepest' or 'biggest' of something, they can have it. After all California has lots of superlatives, like biggest living things, tallest trees, oldest living things, tallest mountain in the lower 48, and so on. I've not been to Hells Canyon. But I have been to Kings Canyon, and what I do know is that it is one of the most spectacular places on Earth.

The upper reaches of Kings Canyon include some of the highest and most rugged parts of the Sierra Nevada crest. Parts of the Middle Fork are too precipitous for roads or even foot trails. These parts of the canyon are protected as Kings Canyon National Park, established in 1940. a full fifty years after the designation of Yosemite as a national park. One of the most pleasant parts of the canyon, Cedar Grove, was left out of the park because of plans to inundate the valley under the waters of a reservoir. Better angels prevailed and Cedar Grove was added to the park in 1965. The downstream (and deepest) part of the canyon is administered by the U.S. Forest Service.

As rugged as the canyon is, a paved highway (Highway 180) provides access to Cedar Grove, and it is pretty incredible to drive. I marvel at the engineering decisions that went into the design of the present-day highway. The terrain is literally impassable, but someone decided where the road would go, and laborers blasted away at the rocks. Most of the construction crews were prisoners. The road was planned as early as 1905, and construction took place during the 1920s and 1930s. At one time it was envisioned that the road would continue up and over Kearsarge Pass to connect with Onion Valley. Thankfully that plan didn't come to fruition. 

The highway passes through some astounding geology. Granitic rocks may make up most of the Sierra Nevada, but Kings Canyon contains exposures of some large metamorphic roof pendants of Paleozoic and Mesozoic age. A stunning cliff of gray marble forms one wall of the South Fork, and contains a number of caverns, including the developed tourist attraction of Boyden Cavern. Quartzite, slate and spectacularly folded calc-silicate rocks are also exposed along the highway.

The viewpoints along the highway just north of Grant Grove are simply beyond compare, giving a full-on perspective of the deepest part of the gorge as well as vistas towards the high country near the Sierra Crest. And...it is a LOT less crowded than Yosemite Valley!

In case you were wondering about other deep canyons, the Sierra Nevada hosts numerous awesome gorges. The Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River is a roadless part of Yosemite National Park which in places is fully as deep as the Grand Canyon at 5,000 feet. I would love to offer pictures, but I haven't traveled through it in many decades. Another canyon, that of the Kern River in Sequoia National Park, is 7,000 feet deep in places. Yosemite Valley is a mere 3,000 feet deep, but with those vertical walls it truly stands apart as one of the unique places of the planet.

Farther afield, Mexico has the Barranca del Cobre (Chihuahua, Mexico). The canyon system has six major gorges, of which Urique Canyon is the deepest and largest, measuring at one point 6,236 feet deep.

The deepest canyon I know of in Polynesia is Waimea Canyon on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. It is sometimes called the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific", but I think it stands pretty well by itself without having to compare it to others. It is a favorite destination of mine when I visit the islands. It is nearly 3,000 feet deep in places.

Waimea Canyon on the island of Kauai in Hawaii

In South America, the deepest canyon I could find info on was Colca Canyon in Peru. At one point it is 13,600 feet deep. 

The ultimate canyons would pretty much have to be where the mountains are the highest, so the deepest canyon in the world is found in the Himalayas. Some of the canyons that pass through the range (the Kali Gandaki or Yarlung Tsangpo Gorges for example) are said to reach depths of 17,000-19,000 feet.

And finally, since it was part of the title, there is the Grand Canyon of Arizona. It's not the deepest canyon overall, but it does maintain a consistent depth of over 5,000 feet for several hundred miles, and there is no canyon like it in the world. I can't even describe how spectacular it is in a few sentences, so I offer the blog series I wrote after a memorable river trip in 2013 in which I almost died, twice, but also had the greatest adventure of my life. Check out Into the Great Unknown. 

The Other California: The Biggest Living Things and the Deepest Canyon in the U.S. (maybe, almost, perhaps)

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks were established 50 years apart (1890 and 1940), and they preserve different aspects of the Sierra Nevada, but they are adjacent and as such are jointly administered by the Park Service. My Other California blog series is an attempt to spotlight the lesser known parts of our state that don't always show up on the postcards that tourists buy, but which have incredible geological features. As a pair of national parks, Sequoia and Kings Canyon don't seem to fit the bill, but I include them because the two parks are less visited, and yet have some of the most spectacular geological scenery to be seen anywhere. How many places can boast the highest peaks, the deepest canyons and the biggest living things in the world?

A bit of perspective on my claims, though. Sequoia National Park includes the highest peak in the lower 48 states, with Mt. Whitney (14,505 feet; 4,421 meters). Denali in Alaska is much higher, and Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii are the tallest mountains in the world (if you measure from the seafloor). Kings Canyon has a reasonably valid claim to being the deepest canyon in North America, but the deepest part of the canyon lies a few miles downstream of the park boundary (though it is partly protected as Giant Sequoia National Monument). But the biggest living things? Absolutely.

There has always been a bit of confusion about the Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron gigantea), because California has two gigantic tree species. The other is the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), which grows in a narrow coastal corridor between Big Sur and the Oregon state line. The Coast Redwood grows to immense heights (nearly 400 feet), but is usually slimmer. The tallest Sequoia trees usually don't exceed 300 feet (the tallest is 311 feet), but the trunk is more robust to a high level, so the shorter trees have the greater bulk, making them the largest living thing on the planet. The state legislature was confused certainly, as they made the "native redwood" into the state tree without realizing the two trees were distinct. The attorney general of the state eventually got involved, making a final ruling declaring both species to be the state tree. Both tree species live for thousands of years, but neither is the oldest living thing in existence. That honor goes to the 5,000 year old Bristlecone Pine, also a California resident species.

The trees are tremendous. They occur in about 60 groves between about 4,600 and 7,000 feet along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Such giant trees would seem irresistible to loggers, and many were cut, but the wood was actually of low quality for most purposes and was usually made into pencils, shingles or grapevine stakes. Today nearly all the groves are protected in the national parks (Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon), a national monument (Giant Sequoia), and a state park (Calaveras Big Trees).

The trees have a geological story. They once thrived across the northern hemisphere, and in North America fossils of the trees are preserved in Yellowstone and Petrified Forest National Parks (the direct ancestors are preserved in Nevada). The petrified trees in Yellowstone are several tens of millions of years old, but the trees in Petrified Forest are several hundred million years old! Ancestors to the Sequoia date at least to the Jurassic Period, so the trees were witness to the evolution of the dinosaurs and their extinction. Climate change seems to have been the tree's nemesis, and the Pleistocene ice ages probably eliminated them from most of their former range. The trees were able to survive in the Sierra Nevada in part because they could propagate downslope and upslope in response to the advancing and receding glaciers (see this National Park Service article for the details on the origin and distribution of the Sequoia trees).

I'm opening a can of worms by discussing the deepest canyon in North America. Hells Canyon on the Snake River along the Idaho-Oregon border is usually described as the deepest, but measurements vary, as well as the precise definition of canyon. I won't make a judgement other than to say that the two canyons are very close to being the deepest, only a few tens of feet apart, and that both of them are 2,000-3,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon (The Grand really is grand, though. According to the park service, with a volume of 4.17 trillion cubic meters, it is the largest canyon in the world). Spanish Peak, at just over 10,000 feet (in the photo below), looms 8,000 feet over the canyon bottom at Rough Creek.

How can this canyon be so deep? If you saw my last post, you would recall that the southern Sierra Nevada is topographically different than the northern Sierra. It is more a high plateau than a westward tilting block. The adjacent Central Valley is different as well. It's been sinking, so much so that some of the sedimentary fill has buried portions of the Sierra foothills. Strange things are happening in the southern Sierra, and it may be related to a process called delamination. The Sierra may have had a dense root of mantle material that was out of equilibrium with the surrounding hotter and slightly fluid mantle. The large mass broke away and sank deeper into the mantle. The overlying crustal rock, the Sierra, popped upwards like a ship losing an anchor. The Kings River, with an increased gradient, started cutting rapidly downwards within the last few million years. Spanish Mountain can be thought of a high secondary ridge like the Great Western Divide, but it was breached by the erosion of the Kings River.

What's ironic? The river that carved the deepest (or second deepest) canyon in North America doesn't flow into the sea. The Kings River historically flowed mostly into a large lake in the southern Central Valley (Tulare Lake) and evaporated away. Some distributary channels delivered water to the San Joaquin River (and then onto the Pacific Ocean), but today the river is fully utilized for irrigation, and even the lake is gone, replaced by agricultural fields.

When we visited a few weeks ago, the road into Kings Canyon was still closed. The problem isn't snow (there wasn't any to speak of). The canyon slopes are so steep and rocky that rockfalls are a continuing hazard when the ground is still saturated and subject to freezing conditions. We had to take a pass this time around, but we'll be back in the fall for a field studies class. Look for pictures around early October!

Oh, and there were some cute dogs hanging out at Grant Grove....