In 1540, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an expedition of 300 soldiers, several hundred Indians, and thousands of horses, cattle, sheep, and other livestock northward from New Spain. Coronado sought cities of gold described by shipwrecked Spanish sailors who had wandered from Florida to Mexico City. The expedition crossed present-day Arizona, and Coronado sent detachments westward to the Hopi villages and the vast river they had described.

Hopi guides led Garcia de Lopez de Cárdenas and his men to the edge of Grand Canyon somewhere between Lipan Point and Desert View, the South Rim’s highest reaches. Expedition journals describe the soldiers’ futile struggle to get to the river, which the Spanish judged to be around six feet wide. (This says a great deal about the unprepared mind’s ability to grasp the canyon’s vast size, as well as the Hopi guides’ cleverness at keeping their rim-to-river trails a secret.) The Spaniards returned to Mexico City in 1542, their expedition deemed a failure.

Later explorations led to colonization further east, in present-day New Mexico, and further west, in California. In 1776, Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasia Dominguez left the colony of Santa Fe to find a northern route to settlements near Monterey, California. On their return journey, winter forced them southward, and they crossed the Colorado River in historic Glen Canyon (now flooded by the waters of Lake Powell). A year earlier, Friar Francesco Garcés, scouting a southern route, had named the river Colorado for its reddish waters. Garcés, Dominguez, and Escalante were the last Spanish explorers to venture near the canyon.