Colorado River in the Inner Gorge
— — the river cutting through the oldest rock in the canyon.
Not only on a wall.
“The Inner Gorge is the deepest cut. The river runs between walls of Vishnu Schist nearly 1.7 billion years old, almost black where the light catches them, polished smooth at the waterline. Above, the canyon climbs out in layers a vertical mile to the rim. Down here the sky is a strip; the rapids are loud; the water carries the red of the upstream side canyons.
Colorado River in the Inner Gorge, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Inner Gorge is the narrow, sheer-walled section of Grand Canyon between roughly river mile 77 and mile 117, where the Colorado has cut down to the basement rocks of the continent. The dominant rock is Vishnu Schist, a metamorphic suite dated to approximately 1.7 billion years, intruded by pink Zoroaster Granite. The gorge sits inside Grand Canyon National Park, administered by the National Park Service. Access is by river through commercial or private float trips launched from Lees Ferry.
The Vishnu Basement Rocks were originally volcanic and sedimentary, buried and heated until they recrystallised into the dark schist visible today. The pink Zoroaster Granite intruded later, in narrow dikes that cut diagonally across the schist. Together they make the polished black-and-pink walls that define the gorge from Phantom Ranch downstream past Crystal Rapid. The contact between Vishnu Schist below and the overlying Tapeats Sandstone marks the Great Unconformity, where over a billion years of rock are missing from the record.
The river through the Inner Gorge runs cold and clear-green when it leaves Glen Canyon Dam upstream, and red-brown when monsoon storms push sediment in from side canyons like the Little Colorado. The biggest rapids of the entire Grand Canyon sit in this section: Hance, Granite, Hermit, Crystal, and Lava Falls just downstream of the gorge proper. Average flows since the dam closed in 1963 run between roughly eight and twenty thousand cubic feet per second.