Last month, I wrote about early maps of the Grand Canyon area and their development through the first half of the twentieth century. Recently, a modern map of Grand Canyon caught my attention. It appeared on a CBS This Morning segment that was passed around Facebook. It’s a nice map, but that’s not why I noticed it. Something’s wrong — can you tell what it is?
Someone has mistaken Havasu Canyon for the Little Colorado River. I’ve taken the liberty of correcting their error below.
Out of fairness to CBS, I should mention that they’re known for sitcoms and news broadcasts, not cartography. And it’s not nearly as severe an error as the “Buenaventura River,” a confused version of the Green River that was once believed to run from Utah to California’s Pacific Coast. In reality, the Green River joins the Colorado River upstream of Grand Canyon.