No. No it doesn’t. If you run water, even hot boiling water or even volcanic lava (the hottest materials found at the Earth’s surface), at very high speeds through a flat surface of mud or wet dirt, you don’t see features anything like a “miniature Grand Canyon”. No experiment running water on a “fresh pad” would result in anything like the Grand Canyon and it wouldn’t result in the sharp turns, u-shaped turns. If you can duplicate that result, I’d really like to see it.
Many variants of rock formations could occur during catastrophic events, so inclination can form (vertical or otherwise). The reformulation of material and other events can occur over time, several times (i.e. stages)
See Mount Saint Helens.
For one thing the erosion on Mt. St. Helen’s after the eruption looks nothing like the Grand Canyon and for another the Mt. St. Helen’s erosion field is only about 20m deep compared to the 1.5km of the Grand Canyon and the debris fields around Mt. St. Helens are made up of rocks & gravels, ash & mud, & the remains of pyroclastic flows, sitting loosely atop each other – they’re not compacted or consolidated. And all this is sitting on steep slopes, pretty much unprotected by any plant cover (particularly immediately after the eruption sequence), and in an area where the average annual rainfall is about 3m for year – a recipe for some pretty impressive erosion. The Grand Canyon is different.
This (Grand Canyon) significant geological feature cuts through layers of limestone, sandstone, shale and metamorphic granite, a mile down to the Colorado River. Those types of rocks are simply not formed overnight or in a few days or weeks even during catastrophic events.
A bit snarky but a good explanation is illustrated here:
Grand Canyon carved by floodwater -- debunked
And your question re: a trench is a nonsequitur WRT this discussion. Trench failures are always due to wedge pressures on the side of the trench; no such pressures exist in a sea of mud.
So would you be willing to dig a trench in a “sea of mud” to the scale of the Grand Canyon, say a 1/16th scale and would you be willing to stand in it for as long as it takes for that mud to turn to limestone, sandstone, shale and metamorphic granite?
See at about 2:19 (Water Accumulation) and get back to me.