Tiger Leaping Gorge gets its name from the legend of a tiger that, being pursued by hunters, leapt from one side of the gorge to the other by bounding off this rock in the middle of the Yangtze river. The boulder is known at least in tour books as Tiger Leaping Stone, and there's even a large tiger statue on the southern bank.
The river, which sits at approximately 1600m altitude, drops 200m over 15 kilometers, and the Tiger Leaping Stone is found at its narrowest point (30m wide -- quite the athletic tiger), so the force of the funnelled water here is pretty darn strong. While some parts of the gorge can be rafted, this ain't one of them, even for experts. It's also noisy, aided by a couple of small nearby falls whose output swirls into the main flow around the same point. Jade Dragon Snow Mountain to the south and Haba Snow Mountain to the north, both of which top 5300m (17,000 ft), form the heights of the gorge, making it arguably the world's deepest (and people do argue about it).
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