In the spring of 1869, a thirty-five-year-old, one-armed Civil War veteran and self-taught scientist led an expedition down the Colorado River into the last uncharted territory in the United States. Ninety-nine days later, John Wesley Powell emerged from the Grand Canyon after one of the most daring journeys in American history. Transformed by his experience, Powell would forever change America's attitude toward the West.

A year after Powell's death in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon and declared it to be "a natural wonder absolutely unparalleled in the world . . . one of the great sights every American should see." The Grand Canyon would come to be embraced like no other natural place in America, a national shrine for those following in the footsteps of John Wesley Powell. This American Experience film is an account of the dramatic quest to explore one of the most unforgiving, and breathtakingly beautiful, places on earth.