Talk:Nahanni National Park Reserve

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[edit] Vagueness of "great canyons"

I dropped by because of the new Category "Canyons of Canada" to see if the Grand Canyon of the Nahanni had an article; it doesn't. Since there's four "great" canyons here, it seems appropriate that they should have a canyons+pic page(s), as will also be necessary for, let's see, the Stikine, the Chilcotin, the Chilko (Black Canyon), the Thompson, the Cheakamus, the Stave (drowned), Capilano, Chehalis, Anderson, Elaho and Bridge Rivers (and counting) and a host of creeks, too. In the case of the Nahanni, if someone monitoring this page has a pic of the main canyon and a proper name for it (I think there is one) please write an article and move the new Canyons of Canada category over to it from here, where I just put it. "Great canyon" sounds a bit high-schoolish; was "grand canyon" meant?Skookum1 22:21, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

The names are First, Second, Third and Fourth. I thought that "great" here ment the same as in "Great Britain". CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 01:10, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
Doesn't have that context with canyons; sounds more like "hey, that's great!" or a mis-take on "grand canyon". There's an official Grand Canyon of the Stikine; are any of the four known as the Grand Canyon of the Nahanni? Otherwise pics for each one, and at least individual redirects (and disambigs as necessary) for those four canyon names to this page, plus a pic of the most canyonesque one. I'd imagine Virginia Falls will/does have its own article (Hunlen Falls should, but doesn't yet). There's more canyons in Canada than people realize; I've only started enumerating the BC list; and that's just things that are known as canyons, capital-c canyons, and not just canyon-like valleys and coulees....Skookum1 06:59, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
Sorry didn't explain myself enough about great/grand. It was just a comment and not a preference for one over the other. The names came from the Canadian Heritage Rivers site. For some reason I didn't look at the Parks Canada site which also calls them 1st - 4th. I just noticed that Parks Canada (in the green box at the top) calls them great. But I have no preference one way or another. This site and this one both call them 1-4 but also refer to a "Painted Canynon" below the falls which may be the 4th. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 08:31, 22 June 2006 (UTC)


My bet on the use of "great' in those websites is because either some bureaucrat has a gee-whiz appreciation of English adjectives, and/or they're not native English speakers; quite likely given the federal civil service (ParksCan) they're native francophones, and the translation of grand from French can be either "great" or "grand" (or just "big" of course). Theres's a difference between a "great guy" and a "grand old man" for instance. But in the case of canyons, "great" is not the usual adjective, certainly not as a category of canyon; more like "great" as in "wow, gee, nifty!" is how it comes across; but again Canadian official English is a hodgepodge of other-language influences. I gather it's First Canyon I was thinking of; and like other canyon-brags it has to compare itself to the Grand Canyon in Arizona; but lots of canyons, including many of BC's (the Stikine, the Bridge, the Homathko, that of Cayoosh Creek (not yet articled), the central Canyons of the Fraser are all deeper than the Grand Canyon; as is Copper Canyon in Mexico. The canyons of the Nile and Tsangpo/Brahmaputra humble the Grand Canyon to a mere multi-coloured scratch into the landscape, and I knkow there's some in South America that are Colorado-humbling, too. It's like people needing to compare waterfall heights to that of Niagara Falls, which is actually a fairly small waterfall in terms of elevation difference and even in terms of waterflow. The Stikine's promotional bumpf also dwells on the Grand Canyon comparison; which to me is rating everything to a comparison in the United States and thereby something of a Canadian pastime/identity issue. The Stikine and Nahanni didn't have a Muir, Roosevelt or Powell to promote them, of course.....more laterSkookum1 17:42, 22 June 2006 (UTC)