Lipan Point - The Canyon's Hidden Basement

A stop on Grand Canyon South Rim, a free self-guided tour.

Lipan Point is one of the best places on the South Rim to see the Colorado River, swinging in long bends below while the canyon opens out wide around it.

Now look for layers that do not lie flat. Those tilted red and dark bands belong to the Grand Canyon Supergroup, laid down as flat layers more than a billion years ago, then broken and tipped by faulting, worn down, and buried under the flat layers you saw from the Village. Where tilted rock meets flat rock, hundreds of millions of years of Earth history are simply missing, a gap geologists call the Great Unconformity.

Down at the big river bend lies the Unkar Delta. From about 850 to 1200 A.D., Ancestral Puebloan families farmed corn, beans, squash and cotton there and built homes and granaries, and archaeologists have recorded dozens of sites. Hopi and other Pueblo peoples count them among their ancestors. Bring binoculars, and stay behind the railing.

Getting here: Continue east on Desert View Drive. Tusayan Ruin and Museum, a small Ancestral Puebloan village from the late 1100s, makes a good side stop on the way; the Lipan Point turnoff comes a few miles after it.

Did you know?: The lower Supergroup rocks visible here, the Unkar Group, were laid down by rivers carrying sediment from mountains in what is now West Texas, roughly 1.25 to 1.1 billion years ago.

Photo op: In late afternoon, frame the river bend at the Unkar Delta with the tilted layers beside it.

Nearby: No restrooms or food here; the nearest are at Desert View a few minutes east.

More on Wikipedia: Grand Canyon · Grand Canyon Supergroup · Unkar Group · Great Unconformity

Lipan Point - The Canyon's Hidden Basement

Stops on this tour