Two Powell Expedition boats beached on a sandbar in Marble Canyon are documented in this stereoview, No. 181 in the Views on the Colorado River, Marble Canon Series, photographed by Hillers and published by J. F. Jarvis, 479 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., titled "The Canon at Noon." The reverse notes that Marble Canyon is 65½ miles in length and from 1,000 to 4,500 feet in depth, and a penciled inscription identifies this as a Powell Expedition view.

Two wooden expedition boats are pulled up on a pale sand and rock shoreline, the nearer vessel large and laden with equipment including oars and rope visible along its gunwales, the second boat moored further back in the calm water. The canyon walls rise in massive vertical faces of dark limestone on both sides, the arched opening of sky above the gorge illuminating the scene in the flat light that gives the image its title. No figures are visible, lending the view a quality of isolation and scale.

John K. Hillers served as the official photographer on John Wesley Powell's second Colorado River expedition of 1871 to 1872, initially as a boatman before taking over photographic duties and becoming one of the preeminent landscape photographers of the American West. His Marble Canyon series, documenting the Powell boats and the canyon's extraordinary geology from river level, remains among the most significant bodies of exploration photography produced in the nineteenth century.

The reverse bears the printed imprint identifying the series as Views on the Colorado River, Marble Canon Series, No. 181, photographed by Hillers, published by J. F. Jarvis, 479 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., with penciled notations reading "Powell expedition" and "$50.00."