Moran Point sits at 7,160 feet on a short spur off Desert View Drive, with 22 parking spaces. NPS singles it out for geology, because the canyon's three main rock groups are all clearly visible from one spot. The tilted Grand Canyon Supergroup is the prize, a package of rock that survives only in isolated remnants. At the Great Angular Unconformity, level beds rest on those slanted ones, and up to 750 million years of record are absent between them. NPS also keeps a display here on the 1540 Spanish party under Cardenas, which may have reached the rim nearby, though the true spot is unknown. The point is also one of NPS's named stargazing spots.
Moran Point's spur is on your left, about three hundred yards off the highway. A ten-minute stop is plenty, and don't count on a toilet out there. The park picks this point as the place where all three of the canyon's main rock groups show clearly. From the point, read it top down. Flat layers first, then the tilted Grand Canyon Supergroup, surviving only in isolated remnants. Beneath it all are the Vishnu Basement Rocks, more than one point three billion years old, once buried up to twelve miles deep. Find the tilt. Where flat rock rests on slanted rock, the gap is smaller than over the basement rock, as much as seven hundred fifty million years. And part of those slanted beds, the Unkar Group, was shed off mountains in what's now West Texas, while a supercontinent was coming together. The mountains are long gone. Their sediment is out there in front of you. In fifteen forty, Cardenas and his men guessed the far rim was eight to ten miles away, and the river no more than six feet across. Three infantrymen climbed about fifteen hundred feet down, a third of the way, and found out otherwise. Nobody knows where they stood. The park put a display here, and one scholar argues for a spot some fifty miles west, so call it a maybe. Pulled in? At the highway, turn left, heading east. First, find the river down there, and try calling it six feet wide.
Photo: NPS · Public domain