Ranger Minutes

Ranger Minutes are short audiocasts or videocasts in which a park ranger shares interesting stories and information about Grand Canyon National Park. Learn more about the the nature, science, history and culture of the canyon with a park ranger as your guide.

While visiting Grand Canyon National Park, attend a free Ranger program or guided walk. View the current schedules here.

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Duration:

3 minutes, 34 seconds

One of the best ways you can experience the South Rim of Grand Canyon in 3 to 4 hours is to combine walking with shuttle bus riding. Learn ways to get out to spectacular scenic views, and visit the historic Grand Canyon Village.

 

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Transcript

Hi, I'm Ranger Lori and I have just a few minutes to share with you a little glimpse into the life of Grand Canyon’s top predator, the mountain lion. Not only is the mountain lion Grand Canyon’s top predator in every habitat through this park, it’s also serving a valuable role. Its helping to maintain the ecological balance throughout this wilderness ecosystem.

Now, the lion, as our top predator in the park, is also a skillful hunter. Weighing up to 200 pounds and measuring in length from 6 to 8 feet long. This is an animal that is capable of running 45 miles per hour, and leaping 15 feet straight up in the air. Wow! It has wonderful senses; great hearing, spectacular vision. In fact, its vision is so good, it can see with 1/6 of the light that you and I need at night. It’s a wonderful nocturnal vision. Don’t let that stop you from going on a night walk while you’re here, though.

They have tremendous weapons as well. You can see, cats have sharp retractable claws, and powerful teeth. In fact, you can tell by looking at the skull of the mountain lion, this is a true carnivore. We don’t have molars, we only have carnassials, these are designed to slice meat up whole and swallow it down. This is a nocturnal animal, or a corpuscular animal, that means it hunts in the twilight. It uses silence, stealth and stalking to capture its food, typically by ambush.

There’s a lot of dining options here at Grand Canyon National Park, both for people and for mountain lions. Mountain lions could start with an hors d'oeuver, like say, a fox, or a ringtail, or even a javelina or wild turkey. But, that’s just an hors d'oeuver, they move onto a bigger course, something like our mule deer, our elk, or even bighorn sheep. Not an easy thing to do. Their food is 4 or 5 times bigger then they are. And their food – is armed. They’ve got weapons and fight back. Hoofs and antlers and horns that can crack skulls, puncture lungs and break ribs.

This isn’t something we have to deal with. In fact, when we wake up in the morning, and open the fridge and reach for the yogurt, yogurt is not usually trying to kill us in the morning. So, it’s a good thing mountain lions are such skillful hunters.

Mountain lions are playing a valuable role, here at Grand Canyon National Park. They’re helping maintain the ecological balance throughout this wild ecosystem. As they feed upon herds of mule deer and elk, they help keep those populations stable, which in turn, keeps all of the vegetation stable, providing habitat and home for everything underneath it. Now, it’s not just what mountain lions eat, but, it’s what they don’t eat, that keeps them such a valuable player here.

Duration:

3 minutes, 25 seconds

Mountain lions (Puma concolor, also called cougars or pumas) inhabit the canyons and forests of the park, and are the region's only remaining large predator. Learn more about this secretive animal's behavior, and habits. Scene description: The entire video is of a of young ranger in uniform. She has shoulder-length hair, and is standing in a forest in front of a large juniper tree with twisted branches.

 

Duration:

1 minute, 58 seconds

Perched right on the very edge of the canyon rim at Yavapai Point, Yavapai Geology Museum offers one of the best vantage points for an overview of Grand Canyon geology. Annotated displays at the base of the panoramic windows show you where to look to see each group of rocks. You can walk between rock column models of the North and South Rims, learn the names of the various rock layers, discover information about the geologic history recorded in the rocks, and visualize the carving of the modern landscape.

 

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Transcript

The Grand Canyon has some very old rock. The oldest rock, way down at the bottom of the canyon, is about 1.8 billion years old. The youngest rock, the layer I'm standing on right now is about 270 million years old. That's much older than the dinosaurs. It's hard to conceptualize these 'illions, and relate them to human timescales but a timeline can help. The trail of time is a geology timeline exhibit along the rim trail between the Yavapai Geology Museum and Grand Canyon Village. There's a time accelerator trail here at the beginning that helps you make the transition between human timescales of years, decades, centuries, to geologic timescales of millions and billions of years. For most of the trail, one step equals one million years. You can start from today, at the Yavapai Geology Museum, and work your way back in time through Grand Canyon's history. Along the way you can see and touch some of the rocks from the many varied layers of the Grand Canyon. These rocks were collected by the river, brought up for display and then placed at their birthdays - or their ages. The canyon itself is a geologically young canyon. It was carved into these very old rocks over only the last five or six million years. That's five steps in a Trail of Time that's over a mile long

Duration:

1 minute, 57 seconds

The Trail of Time is an interpretive walking trail that focuses on Grand Canyon's vistas and rocks, encouraging visitors to ponder, explore, and understand the magnitude of geologic time and the stories told by canyon rock layers and landscapes.

 

Duration:

4 minutes, 28 seconds

Once the sun sets at Grand Canyon and the sky gets dark, you can see stars and planets filling the sky – so many stars, it’s hard to count them all! Grand Canyon National Park is an international dark sky location, which means we’ve worked to reduce our light pollution and people and animals can enjoy the night sky.

 

Duration:

3 minutes, 11 seconds

A visitor, tempted to feed a squirrel for a photo, meets her "Inner Ranger" and realizes that small actions have big impacts to wildlife and other visitors.

 

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