This moment outdoors was brought to you by L.L. Bean, official partner of the National Park

Foundation for the Find Your Park Movement. In the summer of 1869, an expedition embarked from the Green River Station in the Wyoming

Territory.

It traveled downstream through parts of the present day states of Colorado, Utah, and Arizona,

before finally reaching the convergence of the Colorado and Virgin Rivers in present-day Nevada.

Despite a series of hardships, including losses of boats and supplies, near drownings,

and the eventual departures of several crew members, the voyage produced the first detailed descriptions of much of the previously

unexplored canyon country of the Colorado Plateau. Today on America's National Parks, Naturalist John Wesley Powell, and the Grand Canyon National Park.

Arizona has been home to humans for more than 13,000 years.

Ancestral Pueblan people lived in and around the Grand Canyon,

leaving behind dwellings, garden sites, food storage areas, and artifacts that we can see today.

Modern tribes still consider Grand Canyon their homeland.

Eleven contemporary tribes have cultural links to the area and their oral histories are rich

with references to the creation of the Great Chasm and the Terential River.

In fact, much of the canyon isn't part of the National Park.

Large portions lie within the bounds of reservations.

Early European and American explorers of the Grand Canyon were the first to document the power

of the Colorado River and share the beauty

of the immense canyon with the larger world.

The first Europeans to lay eyes on the Grand Canyon were Spanish soldiers in Coronado's army.

They traveled north from Mexico City in search of the seven cities of gold, fabled cities

in the New Mexico Territory purported to hold untold riches.

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