OtterKnow Kids Encyclopedia

The canyon walls show beautiful stripes of red, orange, brown, and tan! Each stripe is a different layer of rock from a different time in Earth’s history. It is like looking at a giant timeline made of stone. Some of the rock at the bottom is nearly 2 billion years old. Visitors can look out from the rim, hike down into the canyon, or even ride mules along the trails!

California condors, one of the rarest birds in the world, fly over the Grand Canyon! Bighorn sheep climb along the rocky walls, and lizards and rattlesnakes live among the rocks. Down at the bottom, the Colorado River is home to fish and frogs. The canyon has different plants at the top and bottom because the temperature changes as you go deeper.

• The Grand Canyon is so deep that it would take about 4 hours to hike from the top to the bottom!
• The Havasupai people have lived inside the canyon for at least 800 years.
• If you stacked 4 Empire State Buildings on top of each other, they would just barely reach the rim from the bottom.
• The rocks at the bottom of the canyon are almost half as old as the Earth itself!