The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is about 17 miles long from the Lower Falls and up to 1,150 feet deep, and much of it is surprisingly young. North Rim Drive is the natural way to see it from this direction, since it leaves the main road on the right, runs one way past Lookout Point, Grand View and the head of the lower falls, and finishes at Canyon Junction without any backtracking. From there, drivers go straight through the junction for Norris; those who skip it turn left. The canyon deserves one to two hours. The steep 0.7-mile out-and-back trail to the lip of the Lower Falls deserves respect. Canyon Village, just right of the junction, has gas and restrooms, and it is the last fuel before West Yellowstone, so anyone running low should fill up here.
North Rim Drive is on your right in under half a mile, past this first spur. It runs one way past the Brink of the Lower Falls, Lookout Point and Grand View, then two-way into Canyon Junction. One warning. The trail at the Brink of the Lower Falls is a hike, not a look, dropping six hundred feet in four-tenths of a mile. Canyon has gas and restrooms, to the right if you're on this road, and no more gas before West Yellowstone. Two kinds of driver reach Canyon Junction, so here's the move for each. Stay on this road, and you'll turn left for Norris. Come in off North Rim Drive, or back from the gas pumps, and you go straight through the junction, west, for Norris. Now the canyon itself. It runs about seventeen miles from the Lower Falls, up to eleven hundred fifty feet deep and as much as four thousand feet across, and it's young, cut mostly within the past twenty thousand years. Its V shape tells you water did the cutting, not glaciers. The reds, oranges and yellows are rhyolite broken down into clay, iron oxides and sulfur by acidic gases and water. About a hundred fifty thousand years ago this was a vigorous thermal area that might have looked a little like Mud Volcano. People knew this place long before the famous expeditions. Five years before the Washburn party, a Blackfeet chief named Big Lake praised this country to a Jesuit priest, Father Xavier Kuppens, and young warriors guided him to the canyon. Stand at any rail on that rim and you're looking into an old hot spring basin, cut open by water.
Photo: NPS Photo / Neal Herbert · Public domain