The Canyon rifle is a concept familiar to sporting rifle

Rifle

A rifle is a firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, with a barrel that has a helical groove or pattern of grooves cut into the barrel walls. The raised areas of the rifling are called "lands," which make contact with the projectile , imparting spin around an axis corresponding to the...

men. The term came into general use in the USA from the 1960s onwards, and alludes to a type of rifle cartridge or rifle-cartridge combination that will shoot very accurately and with an exceptionally flat trajectory

Trajectory

A trajectory is the path that a moving object follows through space as a function of time. The object might be a projectile or a satellite, for example. It thus includes the meaning of orbit—the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass...

 out to distances of 300 - 500 yards, thereby minimising the need for very precise distance-judging before taking a shot. Cartridge-rifle combinations with extremely flat-shooting characteristics are especially appreciated by those sportsmen who hunt in steep, mountainous terrain, often having to make informed "guesstimates" about the distances of deer

Deer

Deer are the ruminant mammals forming the family Cervidae. Species in the Cervidae family include white-tailed deer, elk, moose, red deer, reindeer, fallow deer, roe deer and chital. Male deer of all species and female reindeer grow and shed new antlers each year...

 and other game

Game

A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...

 animals seen on the far sides of dead ground such as valleys and canyons - hence the term.

Although any very high velocity, flat-shooting cartridge-rifle combo will qualify as a canyon rifle, the term has been particularly associated with the very flat-shooting ranges of magnum

Magnum

Magnum may refer to several things:* Moses Magnum, a Marvel Comics villain*Magnum, P.I., a television series** Thomas Magnum, the lead character...

 cartridges, and appropriately chambered rifles, devised and marketed by Roy Weatherby

Roy Weatherby

Roy E. Weatherby was the founder and owner of Weatherby, Inc., an American rifle, shotgun and cartridge manufacturing company set up in 1945. Weatherby created an entire line of custom cartridges, and was one of the people responsible for the industry interest in high-speed cartridges...

 and, more recently, by Lazzeroni

Lazzeroni

John Lazzeroni is a US sporting firearms and cartridges designer and manufacturer. Lazzeroni Arms Company is based in Tucson, Arizona. See Lazzeroni rifles and Lazzeroni cartridges....

.

An important English rifle and cartridge designer who sought a ballistic solution to shooting in mountainous surroundings was David Lloyd

David Lloyd

David Lloyd may refer to:*David Lloyd , chief justice of colonial Pennsylvania*David Lloyd Welsh cleric and translator*David Lloyd , British tenor...

, who developed the .244 H&H Magnum

.244 H&H Magnum

The .244 Holland & Holland Magnum cartridge was created in 1955 in Great Britain by deerstalker and rifle-maker David Lloyd of Pipewell Hall, Northamptonshire and Glencassley in Sutherland, Scotland, and is not to be confused with the smaller-cased and much milder 6 mm Remington...

 cartridge and the Lloyd rifle

Lloyd rifle

The Lloyd Rifle was the 1950s brainchild of English deer-stalker, rifleman, metallurgist and engineer David Llewellyn Lloyd. His objective was to create a high-quality, scope-sighted, magazine-fed sporting rifle capable of dependably high accuracy at long ranges, of retaining its zero despite...

during the 1950s specifically for such conditions.