#hells canyon

1955

(LA Miller)

Hat point Lookout. Hells Canyon. Wallowa County. Oregon. The deepest canyon in North America.

Snake River in Hells Canyon, looking toward Idaho bank from below Imnaha, Oregon, 2012.

Wallowa Mountains (hiking up to Freezeout Saddle) Taken on May 12, 2016 Photographer: Cheryl Hill Source: Flickr

Consequently, you can imagine my confusion over the name of America’s deepest river gorge — Hells Canyon — which sits at the intersection of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. I’ve surmised that it could not have been named after an explorer named “Hell,” because then the canyon surely would have been named “Hell’s Canyon,” to denote the explorer’s possession of it. Even if the explorer’s last name were “Hells,” I’d imagine that the canyon would then have been named “Hells’ Canyon” or “Hells’s Canyon,” depending on whether the cartographer were a Strunk and White fan. (One could argue that if an explorer named Smith had found the canyon, it might have been named simply, “Smith Canyon,” which could be a compelling argument but would require us to ignore the lack of world-explorers (or any people at all, for that matter) with the last name “Hells.”) So, I can only assume that the name refers to multiple hells; in other words, “Hell Canyon” wasn’t nearly satanic enough for the person who named the canyon; apparently he thought that canyon was so deep, so long, so terrifyingly horrible, so hellish, that the only name that he thought could capture the feeling of the multiple hells that the area provoked was the name “Hells Canyon.”