In essence, the canyon is far more than just one giant cleft, as its name seems to imply. Instead, it is a fiendishly elaborate maze in which so many tributaries fork off the main-stem gorge—some 740 of them, by one count—that for anyone attempting a traverse on foot, every mile of lateral progress along the main-stem canyon has to be paid for with an additional two and a half miles of detouring. In getting from one end of the canyon to the other, a hiker will almost triple the 277-mile distance covered by the river.
